Greenshields Writing The Structures of The Subject PDF

HOOK
K
DERE
D
AN
L
IL
E
N
M
LU
CA
S
OR SERIE
EDIT S
WRITING THE
STRUCTURES
OF THE SUBJECT
LACAN AND TOPOLOGY
WILL GREENSHIELDS
The Palgrave Lacan Series
Series Editors
Calum Neill
School of Psychology and Sociology
Edinburgh Napier University
Edinburgh, UK
Derek Hook
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, USA
Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of
the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we
settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably
only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application
to clinical matters and in its application to arange of human activities
and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new
writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new
generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original mono-
graphs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series
will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with
original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or
issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian
theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, poli-
tics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will
work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the
21st century.
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/15116
Will Greenshields
Writing the
Structures of the
Subject
Lacan and Topology
Will Greenshields
University of Sussex
Bridgnorth, Shropshire, UK
The Palgrave Lacan Series

ISBN 978-3-319-47532-5 ISBN 978-3-319-47533-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47533-2
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958740
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover image © Emmanuel LATTES / Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Henry Petrides
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Sussex and the AHRC

who provided the generous funding that supported this project through-
out its first three years. Particular thanks must go to my supervisor, Vicky
Lebeau, who always seemed to get the blend of faith and scepticism just
right, proving remarkably tolerant of my long periods of radio silence.
Vicky’s wealth of psychoanalytic knowledge beyond the Lacanian sphere
and appreciation of Lacan’s sense of humour were invaluable.
I thank my editors and peer reviewer, who greeted the initial proposal
with a heartening enthusiasm and the right questions. Thank you to
Calum for helping me to come up with a better title.
I am very grateful to Ginny Graham at Polity for kindly sending me a
final proof of Adrian Price’s excellent translation of Lacan’s twenty-third
seminar.
Finally, to my mum, dad, brother and sister—thank you for never
asking why.
v
Contents
1 Dissolution and Déblayage 1
1.1 Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas 1
1.2 Theory and the Real 18
1.3 Consistence and Ex-sistence 24
1.4 Notes 33
2 The Topology of the Psychoanalytic Subject 37

2.1 The Sphere 37
2.2 The Interior Eight 41
2.3 The Möbius Strip 46
2.4 The Torus 62
2.5 The Cross-cap 79
2.6 Notes 96
3 Topology and the Re-turn to Freud 103

3.1 Encore 103
3.2 A Möbian Method 114
3.3 The Lacanian Invention and the Millerian Reinvention 127
3.4 The Topology of Revolutions and Systems 141
3.5 From Myth to Structure 154
3.6 The Logic of Sexuation 161
vii
viii Contents
3.7 The Topology of Interpretation 175

3.8 Notes 192
4 The Borromean Knot 203

4.1 From Topography to Knots 203
4.2 Writing the Real 211
4.3 La matière as l’âme à tiers 232
4.4 The Knot’s Iconoclasm 240
4.5 Deconstruction and the Knot 244
4.6 Metaphor and the Knot 246
4.7 From “Thinking-the-Borromean-Knot”
to “Monstrating the Cord”: Writing the Lacanian
(Dis)solution 249
4.8 Notes 259
5 Conclusion: A New Imaginary 265

5.1 Notes 271
Bibliography 273
Index 281
Abbreviations and Nomenclature
Lacan’s published seminars are referenced by number followed by page

number (e.g. SII, p. 67) and his unpublished seminars are referenced by
number followed by the date of a particular session (e.g. SXXV, 9/5/78).
Where an unofficial translation of any work by Lacan that is not a semi-
nar session has been quoted, references for both the translation and the
French original have been provided.
In an attempt to keep confusion to a minimum, a norm has been
imposed on particular terms that appear in quotations. Where Cormac
Gallagher’s translations read: enjoyment, phantasy, o-object, Moebius,
Ø, Real, Symbolic and Imaginary, our quotations read: jouissance, fan-
tasy, object a, Möbius, Ⱥ, real, symbolic and imaginary.
ix
List of Figures
The figures provided in this book are unofficial—which is to say that they are
designed to support and illustrate an interpretation of Lacan’s work. Accompanying
each unofficial figure is an endnote providing the reader with information about
where the figure and other variations on it can be found in Lacan’s published and
unpublished work. While some of Lacan’s topological references can be illus-
trated by classical mathematical diagrams (for example, several of the figures
reproduced in Lacan’s tenth seminar originally appeared in David Hilbert’s
seminal Geometry and the Imagination), others require a more idiosyncratic pre-
sentation. This has naturally led to a proliferation of versions, not least when it
comes to Lacan’s knots. Some of these topologies can initially be quite difficult to
wrap one’s head around: the reader is therefore encouraged to take advantage of
the proliferation of versions by looking at the unedited and untranslated tran-
scripts of Lacan’s seminars available at: gaogoa.free.fr and staferla.free.fr. The new
perspective offered by an alternative representation can often deliver new clarity
and insight. Alain Cochet’s Nodologie Lacanienne also offers a useful compen-
dium of Lacan’s many knots.
Fig. 1.1 The Borromean knot 4

Fig. 1.2 The Borromean knot with two infinite straight lines 16
Fig. 2.1 The Interior Eight 43
Fig. 2.2 The Möbius strip 48
Fig. 2.3 Cutting the Möbius strip 52
Fig. 2.4 Demand and desire on the torus 66
xi
xii List of Figures
Fig. 2.5 The tori of subject and Other 68

Fig. 2.6 Reducible and irreducible circles on the torus 70
Fig. 2.7 The cross-cap 94
Fig. 2.8 The Möbius strip and the disc 94
Fig. 3.1 The Borromean knot of demand/refuse/offer 133
Fig. 3.2 The four discourses 143
Fig. 3.3 The Klein bottle 163
Fig. 3.4 R schema on the cross-cap 167
Fig. 3.5 The interior eight on the torus 181
Fig. 3.6 Constructing a Möbius strip 181
Fig. 3.7 The three different cuts on the cross-cap 186
Fig. 4.1 Freud’s second topography 207
Fig. 4.2 The completed Borromean knot 210
Fig. 4.3 Each ring ex-sists 218
Fig. 4.4 The knot’s ternary logic 224
Fig. 4.5 Orienting the Borromean knot 228
Fig. 4.6 Love and the Borromean knot 230
Fig. 4.7 Braids 232
Fig. 4.8 The trefoil knot 236
Fig. 4.9 From the sphere and the cross to the Borromean knot 241
Fig. 4.10 Cartesian coordinates and the Borromean knot 243
Fig. 4.11 From the armillary sphere to the Borromean knot 244
Fig. 4.12 Nomination and the knot 251
Fig. 4.13 Nr, Ns and Ni254
1
Dissolution and Déblayage
1.1 Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas

Attending an ‘International Encounter of the Freudian Field’ in 1982,
Patrick Colm Hogan was privy to a “striking case.”1 This was not a matter
of bumping into an exemplary neurotic or psychotic in the foyer, but of
listening to the case presentations themselves, some of which had begun
to resemble the performance of a collective delirium that would give any
reasonable onlooker ample cause to assume that the lunatics were now
running the asylum:
The speaker discussed for several minutes the history of a particular case.
He then cited a very abstract, very incomprehensible sentence from Lacan,
dealing with knots. Following this he flashed on the overhead projector a
convulsion of lines and arrows, announcing, “This was the symptom.” He
then concluded that, in the most recent session, and following Lacan’s
analysis of knots, he decided to intervene and ask a question after several
days of silence. “And the result was this”—more arrows and overlapping
curves flashed on the board. “Thank you,” applause.
© The Author(s) 2017 1

W. Greenshields, Writing the Structures of the Subject,
The Palgrave Lacan Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47533-2_1
2 W. Greenshields
It is, of course, possible that in this particular case there was, indeed, a
connection between the quote, the diagrams, and the intervention, poorly
explicated by the speaker, or poorly understood by the auditor. However,
in this one conference alone there were many, many cases like this, and very
few, we think, were open to coherent reconstrual.2
The very idea that the presentation of a clinical construal should itself
require, let alone inhibit, a further reconstrual in order for some mea-
sure of coherence to be attained, is unlikely to persuade those critical
or ambivalent toward Lacanian psychoanalysis to mark on their calen-
dars the dates of any future International Encounters. Of course, there
is a distinguished precedent for the fulfilling of just such an operation of
reconstrual: Freud’s case studies have proved a seemingly inexhaustible
support for a vast industry of interpretation. However, it has undoubt-
edly been the case that the best work produced in this field has very
often not been in establishing or reconfirming a synthesised coherence
in Freud’s work—indeed, it was a principled opposition to precisely this
transformation of the Freudian text into uncritically accepted doxa that
originally gave the Lacanian project its purpose—but in isolating pockets
of incoherence, the recognition of which compels the renewal of theory
and spurs further such readings.
There is a deceptive simplicity to Freud’s work and an easy-going clar-
ity that makes him both a pleasure to read and vulnerable to over-hasty
comprehension. It is, therefore, tempting to straightforwardly suggest
that Lacan, in seeking to dodge the fate suffered by Freud at the hands of
lazy readers, is simply the stylistic reverse of Freud. We might cite as evi-
dence the former’s infamous opening gambit of his appearance on French
television in 1973. A chance, one might think, to coherently present the
case for psychoanalysis and charm untapped human reserves. Lacan,
however, was in no mood to do any such thing:
I always speak the truth. Not the whole [pas toute] truth, because there’s no
way, to say it all. Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s
through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real.
I will confess then to having tried to respond to the present comedy and
it was good only for the wastebasket.
1 Dissolution and Déblayage
3
A failure then, but thereby, actually, a success when compared … with

an aberration … [which] consists in this idea of speaking so as to be under-
stood by idiots.3
For Lacan, the distinction between the truth and the whole truth is fun-
damental to psychoanalytic praxis. The subject always speaks the truth
but it is a truth that announces itself in bits and pieces: homophonic
and grammatical slips provide the material for an analysis that gradu-
ally circumscribes the subject’s real—the illegible, traumatic cause of
the subject’s repetitious blunders. A successful analysis requires numer-
ous such failures of intentional meaning and communication. The
appeal to coherence—to, that is, the possibility of re-construing a whole
truth, of re-constructing an exhaustive narrative that says it all—can
only serve to hinder this uncomfortable process of ‘working-through.’
The subject’s inadvertent Witz forms a comedy of errors—a jumbling
of letters that (to cite a Joycean pun of which Lacan was particularly
fond), rather than being the atomic building blocks of a totalised truth,
amount to little more than litter—to which Lacan’s response was not to
produce a coherent theoretical reconstrual but to produce his own litter
for “poubellication.”4
Given the suspicion with which he regarded clarity and mass appeal,
Lacan would doubtless have appreciated the example given by Judith
Butler in defence of her own unforgiving style. Nixon, addressing tele-
vision audiences across America as the Watergate scandal percolated in
the years before and after Lacan’s own television appearance, and taking
advantage of the popular misconception that truth and clarity are equiva-
lent, would often preface lies by stating “let me make one thing perfectly
clear.” “What”, asks Butler, “does ‘transparency’ keep obscure?”5 What
is obscured when one is “understood by idiots”? It’s worth noting that
Lacan takes things one step further: Nixon could not have told the whole
truth even if he had wanted to.
Nonetheless, as Malcolm Bowie points out, things are not quite as
simple as an opposition between coherent Freud and incoherent Lacan
would suggest:
4 W. Greenshields
[W]here Freud cultivates clarity in the presentation of his ideas, Lacan

cultivates obscurity. But where Freud employs an elaborate rhetoric of
self-doubt in order not to seem too clear too quickly, Lacan, who runs the
risk of not seeming clear at all, often contrives to suggest that a supreme
obviousness is at work beneath the busy textures of his writing.6
It was surely this unlikely mixture of illegibility and a claim to clarity

that Hogan found so repellent. An “incomprehensible sentence from
Lacan” is succeeded by audaciously definitive declarations (“This was
the symptom … [a]nd the result was this”) while in the background the
“textures of writing” form a remarkably “busy” and dense weave; a “con-
vulsion” of arrows, curves and knots signifying nothing. They are this
recounted scene’s navel; both an unintelligible obscurity and an integral
pivot to which the “quote” refers, the “diagrams” present and the “inter-
vention” acts upon. If the connection between these three elements of the
case presentation remains obscure, it is probably because the “analysis of
knots” that binds them has occurred off-stage.
This is perhaps the most insistent and difficult question that arises for
a reader of Lacan’s later seminars: just what is the connection between
the utterances about knots, the images of knots and the effective psycho-
analytic act? Far from being a niche concern, the matter at stake here is
nothing less than the relation between theory and practice in Lacanian
psychoanalysis.
Having first appeared in Seminar XIX (1971–1972), the Borromean
knot represented the final phase of Lacan’s effort to produce a psycho-
analytic topology—a project that explicitly began in 1953 with his first
Fig. 1.1 The Borromean knot (Lacan’s earliest presentations of the Borromean
knot are in SXIX, 9/2/72 and SXX, p. 124)
5
reference to a torus or “ring” which was accompanied by the provocative

contention that such a reference constituted “more than a metaphor—it
manifests a structure.”7 A non-metaphorical access to structure: the appeal
of topology hinged on the possibility of this being realised. It would take
almost two decades for three tori or “rings of string” to be organised into
a Borromean knot—the fundamental property of which is that since no
two of its rings are directly linked it requires a third to hang together:
Now, while this might be a diverting amusette which we might derive a
little pleasure from drawing or constructing for ourselves, it hardly seems
sufficiently substantial to support the years of obsessive study and expli-
cation devoted to it by Lacan and a small band of mathematicians. And
as for the suggestion that this figure is not metaphorical or that it has an
important contribution to make to psychoanalytic praxis—well, this is
surely the height of ridiculousness.
For many of Lacan’s readers, his use of topology is simply a step too far.
David Metzger perfectly captures the pragmatic mindset of those who
“suggest that we can do without some such thing as a Lacanian topol-
ogy. ‘Remember the phallus?’ they tell us. ‘We had a difficult enough
time explaining that away. Why bother talking about something that is
sure to discourage people from reading (about) this important thinker?’”8
Indeed, why bother? It is a reputation from which Lacan’s topologisa-
tion of psychoanalysis has never quite managed to extricate itself: the
impression of utter superfluity, an unnecessary extra layer of self-indul-
gent difficulty that has come to represent the worst excesses of Lacanian
obscurity. And yet, there is, throughout Lacan’s work, the frequently
asserted declaration of topology’s non-trivial and self-evident relevance to
psychoanalysis which critics find as, if not more, off-putting. As Jacques-
Alain Miller puts it, straying deliberately close to a Kantian term certain
to raise the hackles of any good post-structuralist, “[w]e represent this
topology, we manipulate it spatially; sometimes Lacan enhances its value
to the point of showing an enjambment of knots and saying: ‘This is the
thing itself.’ For many, this seemed excessive.”9 How could it possibly be
appropriate to point to a tangle of rings, as Lacan did, and say not only
that this peculiar weave is the most suitable support of the psychoanalytic
subject but—further scandalising those who expect a little more post-
structuralism inspired hand-wringing when it comes to the stability of
6 W. Greenshields
representation from their continental thinkers—also straightforwardly

assert that such a depiction is not a metaphor, image or model?
It is the purpose of this book to examine why we should bother with
Lacan’s topology. Firstly, we must approach the question that Lacan
was asking himself. In other words, to what question was topology the
answer? Why was topology necessary?
If we refer to anything so apparently systematic and coherent as a
Lacanian topology, a topologisation of psychoanalytic theory or a reno-
vation of Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, this is something of a con-
struction. A general artifice of reconstrual has had to be performed since
topology was not, for Lacan, a topic, theme or concept; he did not pro-
duce a seminar or écrit ‘on’ topology in the same way that he produced
a seminar on ethics or an écrit on Gide. It is instead an ever-present sup-
port, knotting itself into the busy textures of his discourse. While we
have imposed a certain measure of coherence by weaving together Lacan’s
scattered patches with some red threads, this coherence only goes so far:
topology’s primary appeal lay in its formalisation of incoherence; its pre-
sentation of logical impasses and structural paradoxes.
Indeed, if, to modify Bowie’s characterisation, the “supreme obvious-
ness” would no longer reside “beneath the busy textures of [Lacan’s] writ-
ing” because this non-metaphorical writing of knots and rings would
itself be supremely obvious (with its precision cutting through the opac-
ity that language, no matter how concise, invariably generates), the struc-
ture itself, the structure that has been presented in this supremely obvious
fashion, is, nonetheless, precisely that which is not obvious. As we shall
see, the structure of the subject of the unconscious contravenes basic
spatio-temporal distinctions and conventions that appear so supremely
obvious to the ego. Lacan frequently emphasised the extent to which his
topology also challenged those intuitions (such as the division between
interiority and exteriority, between what is me and what is not me) that
are not merely a quality of egoic thought and self-apprehension but are
also constitutive of the ego, the necessary support for its persistence. It
is as a writing of discomfortingly paradoxical and unfamiliar spaces and
dynamics that Lacanian topology achieves its fidelity and relevance to the
fundamental psychoanalytic subversion.
7
In Seminar XXIV Lacan followed a demonstration of what occurs when

one turns a torus that is chained with another torus inside-out by sym-
pathetically noting that “these things are very inconvenient, even very
inhibiting to imagine.”10 This is not a vague reference to mental capacity;
for the psychoanalyst, inhibition has a precise psychopathological sense.
As the result of “the naming of the imaginary”11 (i.e. the supposition of
an immutable ontological unity that is this egoic subject’s ‘proper name’)
or, according to Lacan’s Borromean diagram (see Fig. 4.2), the result of an
intrusion of the imaginary into the symbolic (the latter being the dimen-
sion of differential signifiers that only produce a ‘proper name’ when they
invade the real to create a symptom as the locus of the subject’s ontologi-
cal disunity), inhibition is a self-imposed restriction that serves to protect
an illusory coherence. Inhibition is not itself a symptom (qua expression
of psychical conflict), but is instead an avoidance of this expression. It is,
in other words, an obstruction to psychoanalysis itself.
We might think that to psychopathologise the resistance to Lacan’s
topology is a rather sly method of absorbing objections that recalls the
suggestion that anyone who questioned the existence of the Oedipus
complex was unwittingly providing evidence of neurotic repression. In
both cases, validity is proven by criticism. Therefore, the appeal to inco-
herence, to mental inconvenience, is not sufficient; it must be supple-
mented with rigour. Nonetheless, the writing of structure that results
must remain distinct from what is supremely obvious, from what is
immediately apprehended by the ego.
Importantly, the psychoanalyst’s rigour is not necessarily the math-
ematician’s rigour. Before we continue, it is important to state that this
book is not (to paraphrase Lacan’s aphorism on sublimation) an attempt
to raise psychoanalysis to the dignity of mathematics; it does not contain
lengthy disquisitions on the mathematical history and applications of the
various topologies that Lacan refers to and nor does it seek to make these
references what they are not—that is, a writing that effectively supplants
the clinic and rivals the mathematical field of, for example, algebraic
topology for sophistication, development and precision. Lacan frequently
disregarded mathematical convention for the sake of psychoanalytic con-
siderations. Indeed, when asked “[i]s it really necessary to learn topology
8 W. Greenshields
in order to be a psychoanalyst?” he replied that “[t]opology is not some-

thing that [the analyst] must learn as an extra … [W]hether he knows it
or does not … from the moment that he does psychoanalysis, this is the
stuff [l’étoffe] into which he cuts … [but] if his topology is constructed
in a mistaken way, [it] will be at the expense of his patient.”12 Topology
is not an “extra,” a mathematical field imported into the psychoanalytic
field; it is inherent and any mistakes made are the mistakes of a psy-
choanalyst not a mathematician; they are made at the expense not of a
formulation or proof but a patient. It was with psychoanalytic mistakes
that Lacan’s topology was most concerned. Foregoing the effort to fill in
what Lacan left blank and ambiguous or to give his ‘mathematisation’ of
psychoanalysis a glossy finish, we have chosen instead to employ a symp-
tomatic reading, in the hope that close attention to his more awkward
and contorted formulations will reveal the difficulties and paradoxes that
topology was called upon to present rather than resolve.
***
Interestingly, Hogan follows his account of the “striking case” by
observing that “[o]f course, there were many clear and illuminating pre-
sentations also, some strikingly so, such as that of Jacques-Alain Miller.”13
That Hogan is doubly struck suggests that the two presentations occu-
pied opposite ends of a stylistic spectrum. While we will reserve a more
thorough examination of Miller’s contribution to the ‘Freudian Field’ for
later, it’s worth briefly noting the widely accepted assessment, proffered
by Élisabeth Roudinesco, that “Miller’s theoretical reduction … made it
possible to show a broad public that a body of work hitherto regarded
as hermetic and ambiguous was really quite coherent and rigorous.”14 The
inferred mutuality between these last two terms warrants further atten-
tion since if, for Lacan, the cultivation of rigour in psychoanalysis was
necessitated by the risk of this discipline becoming a barely credible
voodoo, this same rigour did not result in interpretations that produced
coherent histories belonging to newly coherent subjects. It was simply
a matter of more rigorously “hold[ing] on to the real.” As Lacan often
reminded his audience, a Borromean knot only holds together as a whole
by virtue of the fact that the rings have holes. He made no secret of the
fact that his experimentation with knots would not herald a new dawn of
9
psychoanalytically ensured sanity: “I am psychotic simply because I have

always tried to be rigorous.”15
Roudinesco provides a fascinating account of the mania that consumed
Lacan and his mathematician friends, characterising their collective effort
as a “search for the absolute,” in reference to Balzac’s La Recherche de
l’Absolu—the tale of a man (Balthazar Claës) who haemorrhages a sub-
stantial fortune and spurns his family during the course of an obsessive
hunt for the alchemical absolute. If, however, this particularly wretched
chapter in Balzac’s vast Comédie humaine testifies to the folly of utterly
committing oneself to a realisation of the desire for knowledge in the
form of the whole truth, Lacan was keen to impress upon his readers
and listeners—who had either reverentially, or, in the case of Derrida,
critically, regarded him as the “purveyor of truth”16—that his “respon[se]
to the present comedy” that is the human condition would not be a
curative panacea that provided all the answers: “The desire to take cogni-
zance [connaître] meets obstacles. I invented the knot to embody such an
obstacle.”17 The function of the knot is clearly established here: far from
amounting to a grand synthesisation and completion of psychoanalytic
theory, it is instead deployed as the non-signifying support of that which
cannot be theorised.
As one of Lacan’s fellow inhabitants of what Roudinesco wryly refers
to as the “planet Borromeo,” the topologist Pierre Soury provides an
indispensible description of what they were up to: “What was our point
of departure? … [T]here was the definition of a casse-tête [puzzle] …
A casse-tête is a simple and unforeseen problem with a solution that’s
not easily repeatable, conscious, transmissible, or verifiable.”18 If we take
Soury’s self-effacing characterisation too seriously, treating the results
of fiddling about with rings of string as little more than a Sudoku-style
brain-teaser (casse-tête), we risk badly underestimating what was at stake
in such research. The passage from problem to solution was not a passage
from incoherence to coherence; an effective practice that was to do jus-
tice to “the great casse-tête,” “the riddle of the unconscious,”19 might not
necessarily be repeatable, teachable, verifiable or reducible to conscious
knowledge. And yet, it cannot be a form of magic; it must be rigorous.
The results of Lacan’s lifelong grapple with this double-bind are among
his most significant contributions to psychoanalytic thought.
10 W. Greenshields
In an illuminating dialogue with Alain Badiou, Roudinesco suggests

an alternative literary doppelganger for Lacan: Oedipus at Colonus.20
Towards the end of his life Lacan was indeed enacting an extraordinary
dissolution: disbanding his school and the theoretical foundations of his
thought as his physical incapacity grew increasingly pronounced and the
periods of muteness became more prolonged. If the union of these two
literary figures seems incongruous—Claës suffers because he does not
know enough, Oedipus suffers because he knows too much—and yet
oddly appropriate, this says much about the difficulty of assessing the
significance of this last phase of Lacan’s thought in terms of its contribu-
tion to knowledge. What does Lacan know? It is a question we ask the
unconscious. As Badiou notes, in an elegant passage worth quoting at
length, the “final Lacan”—his “solution” to the “great casse-tête” or his
dissolution in response to it—has himself become something of a casse-
tête that singularly resists reconstrual:
[Lacan] impose[d] on whoever listen[ed] to him this terminal, final unrav-

elling. This posture is, to be sure, in certain ways obscure, spectral. But it
reveals and condenses the tragedy itself of the subject. Not giving up on
your desire is also being able, and knowing how, to undo what you believe
you have done and tied together in a compact way. The final Lacan is obvi-
ously difficult at first, but he takes on in this way an eminence, an excep-
tional stature.
This is one of the reasons why his death struck me as a completely par-
ticular event. That masters will die one day, we all know. However, the
death of Lacan was cloaked in a singular aura because it echoed his own
work. His death is modelled after his late thought, which was placed under
the sign of, precisely, Oedipus at Colonus, this figure of an old man who
dies and leaves to all the world the insoluble enigma of his death. Lacan, if
I may say so, succeeded in pulling this off: the muteness of his last years
and his death form an integral part of his enigmatic legacy. Twenty years
later, Lacan’s mystery is still there. The relation to his work cannot be sta-
bilized, even if you recognize him as a master. We will never finish inter-
rogating this man and his thought. What was it about really, at bottom?
Psychoanalysis? Obviously. Philosophy? Yes, in a certain sense.
Contemporary writing, the adventure of language? Of course. The drama
of subjectivity? That too. And what else? Is there some unfathomable
11
remainder? Lacan was, is, and will always be an enigma, an author who is
impossible to classify and to completely decipher.
… Everyone knows [Wittgenstein’s] famous aphorism that closes the
Tracatus logico-philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
be silent.” If the real is unsymbolizable, it is ultimately that about which
one cannot speak; therefore, one must be silent. But remaining silent
always implies as well, and this is still Wittgenstein’s perspective, the duty
to indicate, to point. You must show that about which you must remain
silent. I imagine the late Lacan as someone who continues to point his
finger at an unsayable real. Except that, in the end, we can no longer know
what this gesture indicates and truly implies. It is left to us as an enigma,
like death itself.21
There is the real ‘of ’ Lacan—the (for want of a better word) concept
that we associate with Lacan—and then there is the real of Lacan, his
“unfathomable remainder”; the apparent impossibility of saying what his
topological presentation of the real “indicates and truly implies.”
The necessity to be silent with regards to “the real” as that which “fore-
closes meaning” was clearly troubling Lacan as he began the eighth ses-
sion of Seminar XXIII: “The only excuse I have for saying something to
you today … is that this is going to be sensé, sensible. In view of which
I shall not be doing what I would like to, which would be to give you
un bout de réel, some odd or end of the real.”22 If this was Lacan’s desire,
which he refused to give up on, it was not an epistemological desire in
the traditional sense—it was not the desire for a possibility; the possibility
of “saying it all,” of realising the “whole truth” or the clarity of unequivo-
cal meaning—but a desire or “duty to indicate” the impossibility of such
desire with the knot. In tune with the non-linear temporality of desire,
Lacan closed the session with a critical glance behind himself and an
anxious look ahead:
Will I manage to tell you—it oughtn’t to be merely a dream—what would

qualify as un bout de réel[?] … For the time being, we may say that Freud
himself produced nothing but sensibleness [sensé], and this takes away all
my hope. This is not, however, a reason, not for me to hope to, but for me
really to do so someday.23
12 W. Greenshields
Lacan had argued in Seminar XVII that the Oedipus complex—the prod-
uct of Freud’s attempt to explain the enigma of sexuality through recourse
to the universal truth of mythic meaning—was “Freud’s dream.”24 Dreams
stage an encounter with the real, but it is always a missed encounter; such
is the anxiety provoked in the subject by the oblique glimpse at the real
of his desire that the dream affords, the subject awakens so that he might
continue to dream:
No praxis is more orientated towards that which, at the heart of experience,

is the kernel of the real than psychoanalysis. Where do we meet this real?
For what we have in the discovery of psychoanalysis is an encounter, an
essential encounter—an appointment to which we are always called with a
real that eludes us.25
Freud had produced something meaningful: with the Oedipus complex,

desire had been given meaning—a natural path of development and reso-
lution in the sexual relationship. Freud had retreated from the real and
continued to dream. This is why a large part of this study will be given up
to a reading of Lacan’s return to Freud—his effort to shift the foundation
of psychoanalytic praxis “from myth to structure”26 and, ultimately, to
the topology of knots. While Roudinesco’s effort to mythologise Lacan,
to see in him the shuffling gait of an aged Oedipus or the mad ambition
of a deranged alchemist, to say that we have seen his like before—to
declare, as Freud did, that we can understand Hamlet and, indeed, every
other troubled soul, because we have seen Oedipus Rex—is certainly a
start, her reluctance to regard his late encounter with “the great casse-tête”
as anything other than a case study in melancholic senility or a vainglori-
ous search for the absolute, threatens to reverse the passage “from myth
to structure” to which Lacan devoted himself, thus necessitating a return
to the return to Freud.
Lacan was particularly keen to avoid the mortification undergone by
Freudian thought at the hands of the psychoanalytic church. Hence his
climactic unravelling: “The problem is revealed as such, at having a solu-
tion: which is a dis—a dissolution … That it be enough for one to go
away for all to be free is, according to my Borromean knot, true of each,
but must be so of myself in my École.”27 Those analysts that listened to
13
Lacan were given “un bout de réel” by being taken to the point of realis-
ing, as one does at the end of analysis, that “the Other”—the monolithic
socio-symbolic network of law and language that is supposed, by sub-
jects, to know the solution; a solution would be repeatable, conscious,
transmissible and verifiable—“is missing.”28 It is apt, then, that we find,
in the margins of the lines with which Lacan began his television appear-
ance, the matheme S(Ⱥ): the signifier (S) of the barred (/) Autre (A).
It is by failing to say the “whole truth” that one “holds onto the real” and
affects a (dis)solution. The demotion of universal predicates (guarantors
of a coherent Other) such as the Oedipus complex and the ‘Name-of-the-
Father’ to the status of dreams and fragile sutures constituted important
theoretical shifts that Lacan, with this unravelling, came to enact, dissolv-
ing the distinction between theory and practice. We are left with the real
of Lacan, the enigma of his death, his (dis)solution.
For Lacan, every drive is a death-drive insofar as the subject is driven
to re-find the lost object that would render this very drive obsolete.
However, the drive operates on a false premise; the object that would
restore the subject to a prelapsarian state of wholeness never existed in the
first place: it cannot be re-found because it was never actually found(ed):
The only advantage of this finding again [retrouver] is to highlight what I’m
indicating, that there cannot be any progress, that one only ever goes round
in circles.
Even so, there is perhaps another way of explaining that there is no prog-
ress. It is that there is no progress but bearing the stamp of death…
The death drive is the real inasmuch as it can only be pondered qua
impossible. This means that each time it rears its head it is imponderable. To
approach this impossible could never constitute a hope, because this impon-
derable is death, whose real grounding is that it cannot be pondered.29
As Badiou’s eulogy suggests, Lacan engineered a way out of this impasse—

that is, the impasse of futility that any notion of progress conceived of in
terms of a restoration of totality (i.e. death qua satisfaction) will invari-
ably abut upon—with the event of dissolution. What “this gesture indi-
cates and truly implies” we cannot say: “It is left to us as an enigma, like
death itself.” When Lacan states that the real “forecloses sens [meaning],”30
14 W. Greenshields
we might also be mindful of an alternative translation of sens as direc-

tion: the drive is a “dérive [drift],”31 having no natural, fixed or actual
object(ive) such as the realisation of the sexual relationship or the forma-
tion of a unified psychoanalytic institution that knows and transmits the
whole truth. “[T]here is no progress” for Oedipus and Lacan, these weary
drifters, “but bearing the stamp of death.”
According to Roudinesco, this act, for all its earnest authenticity, con-
stituted not just a dereliction of theory but also a dereliction of duty
which left the future of Lacanian psychoanalysis in a perilous state:
Unlike Freud, Lacan leaves nothing as a legacy. He undoes what he built by

knitting his knots and his pieces of string. And this is why Lacan’s heritage
is in danger, more so than that of Freud: the psychoanalysts of the first
Lacanian circle received nothing as a legacy, they received the dissolution
… And what is more, he never stopped advocating “the work of dissolu-
tion,” as if it were a major concept.32
It’s worth remembering that Freud’s “heritage” was endangered precisely

because he had left a legacy of sens; his successors inherited a direction,
an institution and a body of knowledge that they set about embalming.
Lacan remained mindful of “the effect of a consolidated group, at the
expense of the discursive effect expected from an experiment [l’expérience],
when it is Freudian. One knows what price was paid for Freud’s having
permitted the psychoanalytic group to win out over discourse, becom-
ing a Church.”33 The efficacy of psychoanalysis is dramatically dimin-
ished when the “experiment” is advanced in accordance with an inflexibly
adhered to knowledge that serves as a predictive, prescriptive template for
interpretation. In this state, psychoanalysis lives on but it is really more
of a living death, a ghoulish preservation. Opposed to the dynamism of
a “discourse,” the “group” is an All; it unifies its individual components,
putting them to the service of a uniform direction which is then univer-
salised. Psychoanalysis, which cannot be effective unless the singularity of
the patient’s contingent history is considered as irreducible to any sens,
can only “go round in circles,” effecting no progress, while it remains the
preserve of the group: “I am within the work of the unconscious. What it
shows me is that no truth responds to malaise other than one particular
to each of those whom I call parlêtres [speaking-beings]”34: “That is why
I am dissolving.”35
15
And yet…“[i]n other words, I persevere.”36 If Lacan’s experimental

school (the École freudienne de Paris) had itself ceased to serve “the dis-
cursive effect expected from an experiment”—if the effect of the École
had become “l’effet de colle,”37 inhibiting practice with the group’s binding
glue—, then a “compensatory counter-experiment”38 was called for. As
an integral part of the “counter-experiment” (i.e. the École de la Cause
freudienne), the cartel (a provisional study group comprised of four peo-
ple and a ‘plus-one,’ dedicated to the reading of a work or examination
of a concept) would avert the glue effect of organisational uniformity
provided it was disbanded within two years, keeping the work of dissolu-
tion and renewal going: “there is no progress but bearing the stamp of
death…” Excepting a fidelity to the Freudian experiment, no standardisa-
tion was to be imposed on the cartels and “cartelisands”: “I am not going
to make a totality out of them. No whole.”39 However, this “work of dis-
solution” advocated as a “major concept” “is not”, argues Roudinesco, “a
testament.”40 Lacan, we think, would not disagree, but this is entirely the
point: psychoanalysis is a dynamic activity, not a collection of scriptural
commandments bequeathed by forefathers.
If the knot of the EFP had been unravelled, it is apt, then, that the knot
should appear again, retied, in Lacan’s ‘Overture to the First International
Encounter of the Freudian Field.’ At this first annual gathering of the
ECF, which took place in Caracas, Lacan helpfully offered to “sum-
marise” “the debate I’ve been keeping up with Freud”:
My three are not the same as his [id, superego and ego]. My three are the
real, the symbolic and the imaginary. I came to situate them by means of a
topology … The Borromean knot…
I gave [donné] that to my pupils. I gave it them so that they might find
their way in their practice. But do they find their way any better than with
the topography Freud passed down [léguée] to his?41
While we will reserve a more sustained examination of the merits of topol-

ogy and the deficiencies of (Freudian) topography for later, let us here
take careful note of Lacan’s language. Freud’s knowledge (of which the
static topography is a pertinent representative) is bequeathed (“léguée”)
as part of a scriptural will or legacy guaranteed by the Other. A gift is
16 W. Greenshields
something quite different; it has no legal, institutional or formal basis.

Lacan was keen that cartels be made up of readers, not pupils: a reader can
do as he wishes with a gift. Since Lacan’s expressed preference for readers
occurs just a few paragraphs before this query,42 it is not stretching things
to suggest that the distinction between a (bequeathed) topography and
a (gifted) topology is related to the distinction between a pupil and a
reader. While the former is the passive recipient of knowledge, the latter
is forced to interpret. If Lacan “gave” the knot “to [his] pupils,” rather
than bequeathed a knowledge, if he proffered the “work of dissolution”—
the making and unmaking of knots—as a “major concept,” it was so that
his pupils might become readers—analysts who “find their way in their
practice” (note the recurrent reference to particularity) in the absence of
a proscribed meaning or direction (sens).
Returning to the session of Seminar XXIII in which Lacan expressed
his desire “to give [donner] you un bout de réel,” we find him presenting his
audience with a knot that “Soury and [Michel] Thomé have given [donné]
me. It’s a Borromean knot of my sort.”43 What makes this knot (produced
by a cartel dedicated to providing solutions to casse-têtes that are not easily
transmissible as a knowledge) so peculiar and, indeed, Lacanian, is that
instead of being comprised of three closed rings, it has one ring and two
infinite straight lines (see Fig. 1.2):
It was just such a knot that Lacan chose to give his audience at Caracas:
Of course, my knot doesn’t tell the whole story [pas tout]. Without which
I wouldn’t even have the opportunity of taking my bearings in what is
Fig. 1.2 The Borromean knot with two infinite straight lines (We have pro-
vided a generic presentation of the knot. The specific knot to which Lacan is
referring can be found in SXXIII, p. 100. Lacan’s earliest presentation of the
knot and the infinite straight line is in SXXI, 21/5/74. See also: SXXII, 10/12/74,
18/2/75, 8/4/75, 13/5/75, SXXIII, pp. 16, 22–23, 39, 67, 90, 94–97, 99, 119)
17
there, because there is, I say, not-all [pas-tout]. Not-all, quite surely, in the
real that I broach in my practice.
Remark if you will that in my knot the real features constantly as a
straight line stretching to infinity, i.e. the unclosed circle that it presup-
poses. This is what upholds the fact that it can only be admitted as
not-all.44
If Lacan’s second sentence (“…taking my bearings…”) recalls the chal-

lenge for analysts who must discover “their way”, it also names a quality
that persists in this perplexing topos and helps one to gain one’s bearings
“in what is there”: “there”—where?—“is, I say, not-all.” The pedantic
reference to the very act of speaking (“I say”) is made in order to empha-
sise that the not-all emerges in speech. To recall the opening lines of
his television appearance, Lacan always speaks the truth but “[n]ot the
whole [pas toute] truth.” Although it is difficult to imagine—which is,
of course, part of the appeal for Lacan—a knot comprised of infinite
lines holds just as well as one comprised of circles since the ‘rings’ cannot
slide off one another. Despite this consistency, however, the knot remains
a work in progress; it cannot be framed or totalised. Within (or with-
out?—this is undecidable) its organisation, there remains un bout de réel;
a “not-all [pas-tout]” that constitutes and dissolves its suppositious “all,”
with regards to which analysts must “find their way in their practice.”
Here, the knot embodies a structural paradox that analysts repeatedly
find: the consistency of a subjective structure depends upon a locus that
this same structure cannot incorporate. In other words, the analyst finds
his way and takes his bearings by referring to something that cannot be
apprehended but which is also not straightforwardly beyond structure.
As Lacan’s first two sentences suggest, it is precisely because “my knot
doesn’t tell the whole story” that it allows him to take his bearings.
Holding to the real, Lacan concluded his address in an apt fashion:
“I don’t tell you everything [pas tout]. To my credit.”45
Evidently, when Hogan attended the 1982 iteration of this same event,
the enigmatic knots had retained their position in Lacan’s school and its
experiments while remaining no less awkward to communicate or digest.
What follows is not a “coherent reconstrual” but a reading of Lacan’s
attempts to rigorously give un bout de réel with topology.
18 W. Greenshields
1.2 Theory and the Real

Three years before his death, at a conference held at the Sainte-Anne
hospital, an exhausted Lacan presented, in a series of staccato sentences
that resemble the esoteric gnomes of a high-priest just as much as they do
the axioms of a mathematician, the final state of his theory of the uncon-
scious, taking care to emphasise that “the word presentation is absolutely
essential.”46 Such is the care with which Lacan chose his words, we have
already, in this brief representation of his presentation, produced a major
distortion. “To speak about the theory of the unconscious,” Lacan had
warned his audience a decade earlier, “is really to open the door to this
sort of ridiculous deviation that I am hoping to prevent. This is what has
been displayed already … under the term of ‘applied psychoanalysis’ …
To apply it precisely to what? In particular to the fine arts!”47
At the risk of producing a glib précis without having even begun the
work necessary to legitimise and support it, it is surely the challenge of
speaking and writing about the unconscious, without the resulting body
of work attaining the status of a rigid body of knowledge (or theory), that
accounts for the purpose, particularity and difficulty of Lacan’s thought.
Furthermore, if the unconscious is made the object of theoria—if, in other
words, it is treated as a situated spectacle that can be thought about and
contemplated from afar—it, rather than being rescued from obscurity, is
radically obscured, not simply because it is antithetical to conscious com-
prehension, but also because it can, as a theory, be considered apart from
practice. There are two important points here: if, as Lacan puts it, “I am
within the work [dans le travail] of the unconscious,”48 if this is not a topos
that observers might “find their way” around by regarding it from a point
of detachment, it is also the case that “I am working in [travaille dans]
the impossible to say.”49 While the spatio-temporal fabric of transference,
in which the work of the unconscious presents itself to be read, seems to
have no bounds, with its folds sweeping the analyst inside, allowing for
no exclusion, it is also marked by a hole, an impasse that paradoxically
renders this all-encompassing structure incomplete.
Requiring the severance of the unconscious from the clinic for its con-
stitution and propagation, psychoanalytic theory—in its first guise as a
“theory of the unconscious” and its subsequent interdisciplinary guise
19
as a theory of the textual or authorial unconscious—is confronted with

a problem when, returning to the analysand or text, practice becomes a
matter of the application of theory. The ideal of “theoria,” notes Lacan,
is “the exhaustive knowledge” which would “allow us to give an account
of ” the theorised object’s “entire past no less than its entire future. It is
clear that none of this affords any place to what would be the realisa-
tion of anything new, a Wirken, an action, properly speaking. Nothing
could be further removed from the Freudian experience.”50 For Lacan, the
speculative aspect of classical theoria is often only a prelude to the accu-
mulation and consolidation of knowledge. The mutuality between nov-
elty, “action” and “experience” is one that Lacan stressed throughout his
work. Just as the application of psychoanalytic theory to literature simply
served to confirm psychoanalytic truths rather than reveal anything new
about literature itself, so too will a clinical praxis that operates on the
basis of a consolidated and comprehensive knowledge—an already known
knowledge—be extremely limited in its practical efficacy. To be “within
the work of the unconscious,” rather than applying knowledge to it, is to
confront “the impossible to say.”
In his 1978 conference address, Lacan offered an extraordinarily com-
pact history of his Séminaire by remarking that in order to “present” the
unconscious and not simply theorise it, his “discourse” had concerned
itself with a process of “clearing [déblayage]” that had two stages: first, he
“presented something” concerning Freud’s famous case presentations and
secondly, he produced “a presentation of the unconscious which is of …
a mathematical order”, again emphasising that “it [Ça] is only a presenta-
tion.”51 Of the latter presentation, Lacan stated that “I presented things
in the form of … the Borromean knot,”52 with each ring corresponding
to one of the three “things” (the registers of the imaginary, symbolic and
real) that, when knotted together, constitute and support the psycho-
analytic subject. How is it that these two modes of presentation do not
constitute a theorisation? How is it that in failing to tell the whole story
they allow the analyst to take his bearings?
Looking again at Fig. 1.1, a familiarity with the terms used above—
a knowledge of theory, or, more precisely, theory as knowledge to be
learned and applied—is far less important than an awareness of their
presentation—that is to say, the structure or “mathematical order” of the
20 W. Greenshields
terms (imaginary, symbolic and real). If each term is presented by a ring,

what is the effect of this ordering? How do the terms relate to one another?
What, in this order, is possible and impossible? What is the structure—the
minimal, axiomatic invariant that makes this structure what it is?
Are these the questions of a theoretician or a practitioner? If this question
remains difficult to answer, what does this difficulty tell us about Lacan’s
presentation? Does this distinction survive Lacan’s topological turn?
***
Lacan recalls that he “had already announced these things” in a 1953
lecture titled ‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real’.53 Now, while
we might be tempted to understand this statement as a suspect attempt
to retroactively posit a theory of a theory, a history of theoretical coher-
ence or clarity of purpose—a meta theory that treats theory itself as
a spectacle to be judged and appraised from a vantage point in order
to produce an “exhaustive knowledge” that not only knows its “entire
past” but has also, so it turns out, always known its “entire future”—this
would elide an important distinction between 1953 and 1978. Where
previously “things” had been “announced,” or presented by means of an
announcement (the declarative gesture of a maître conveying points and
principles in language), these “things” are now “presented … in the form
of … the Borromean knot.” There is a difference between the naming of
things and the presentation of their structure. This is not simply a minor
cosmetic alteration to the delivery of theory but an attempt to discern
and test the limits of theory itself.
It is striking, then, that Lacan, taking Freud’s case studies as his sup-
port, opened his 1953 lecture by arguing that a confrontation with these
limits is inherent to psychoanalysis: “One thing cannot escape us at the
outset—namely, that there is in analysis a whole portion of our subject’s
reality [réel] that escapes us. It did not escape Freud when he was dealing
with each of his patients, but, of course, it was just as thoroughly beyond
his grasp and scope.”54 The réel at stake here has a strange status; if it is
“beyond” the “grasp and scope” of conscious theoria, this “beyond” is not
that of a divine absolute that sits radically outside a clearly defined limit. If
this real “escapes us,” this very fact “cannot escape us”; it remains, as a hole
in knowledge. Its inescapable escape does not stop bothering us—if only
it would simply go away or cease to exist. Instead, it exists as impossible
21
(“the impossible to say”); this impossibility is its negatively defined essence.

If, therefore, we were to proffer a theory of Lacanian theory by returning
to these early works, it would only be to observe the consistency of a
project’s attempts to draw attention to, and present the absence of, that
which cannot be theorised. As Lacan puts it, the fact that the subject’s réel
“escapes us” “cannot escape us at the outset”: its absence is the foundation
of his, and any analyst’s, practical project: “It is quite true that [the real] is
not easy to talk about. That’s where my discourse began.”55
In his ‘Translator’s Notes’, Bruce Fink writes that “le réel (the real) and
la réalité (reality) are often indistinguishable in ordinary French usage
as well as in this stage of Lacan’s work.”56 However, there are occasions
in this lecture (particularly in the passages quoted above and below)
when the distinction is certainly suggested and worked on, if not directly
announced. The real is not clearly defined; it does not enter the lexicon of
theory. It “escapes us” and also appeared to escape Lacan’s listeners at the
time. As Françoise Dolto remarked in a discussion following the lecture:
“We always arrive at the same question, ‘What is the real?’ And we always
manage to move away from it.”57 To even begin to pose the question
“what is …?” is to overshoot, to re-present or theorise Lacan’s presenta-
tion, to presume a being graspable by the copula (“is”).
Advancing what is, we recall, the first part of the “clearing” operation,
Lacan turns his attention to several of Freud’s famous cases, remarking
that “[t]his direct element, whereby Freud weighs and appraises person-
alities, cannot fail to strike us.”58 For Lacan, there is a very particular
reason as to why an analyst might suffer a lapse of discipline and start
discussing various banalities such as character or spirit, especially when
what’s at stake is a training analysis—when, that is, the end of analysis
marks the subject’s passage from analysand to analyst:
[M]ust someone be neurotic in order to be a good analyst? A little bit neu-

rotic? Highly neurotic? Certainly not, but what about not at all neurotic?
In the final reckoning, is this what guides us in a judgement that no text can
define and which leads us to appraise personal qualities? In other words, do
we rely on the reality [réalité] expressed by the following—that a subject
either has the right stuff [l’étoffe] or he doesn’t, that he is, as the Chinese say,
xian da, a worthy man, or, xiao ren, an unworthy man? This is certainly
something that constitutes the limits of our experience.59
22 W. Greenshields
Here, Lacan infers a vital distinction between réalité and the réel: if the
former can be “expressed” or announced by referring oneself to what
Lacan calls the Other or the symbolic (i.e. the pre-existing sphere of sig-
nifiers which allows the subject to be situated, named and supported by
way of the Law (morals, ideals, etc.) as, for example, a “worthy man”), the
latter cannot be articulated by theoria; “no text can define” the subject’s
real. The real does not just “constitute the limits of our experience” but
makes this psychoanalytic experience an experience of the limit. It is only
by means of this experience—an experience that necessarily takes place
beyond the bounds of theoria, beyond what is already known—that the
“realisation of anything new, a Wirken, an action” can occur. According to
Lacan, reality is comprised not just of the symbolic but also the imaginary.
The latter grants the relational web of differential signifiers an illusory
coherence and consistency, allowing fixed reference points and identities,
such as “worthy man,” to anchor the subject. All psychoanalytic cases
involve a particular knotting of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real.
The “étoffe”—the “stuff” or, to use an alternative translation, fabric—at
stake is not some vaguely ontological substance like moral fibre, but a
knot comprised of threads and holes by which what we say about our-
selves (reality) and that which cannot be said or theorised (real) is bound.
This knot “doesn’t tell the whole story,” and it is from this failure, rather
than from any applied knowledge or personality appraisals, that the ana-
lyst takes his bearings.
In his 1953 lecture, Lacan stated that the question of “[w]hat is
brought into play in analysis” is “raised by all those who try to formu-
late a theory of psychoanalytic practice [expérience]”60—an experience
that should always entail an encounter with that which “constitute[s] the
limits of our experience.” It is a question he continued to ask: in a passage
in Seminar XVI that closely precedes his dismissal of the idea that he is
producing a “theory of the unconscious,” references to a “theory of psy-
choanalytic practice [pratique]” and an “experience of the unconscious”
abound.61 If, ultimately, theory cannot be detached from practice—
if “in order to explain it, we need first but demonstrate its movement
by working”62—and if this Wirken brings “into play” the subject’s real
(the untheorisable unconscious that remains impossible to domesticate)
23
this makes the question of what it is that Lacan accomplished in his semi-
nars and écrits endlessly problematic.
We can, however, conclude this section with four important, awkward
and interlinked points that comprise the skeletal manifesto for a “clear-
ing” operation that reaches beyond theory:
(1) A purpose:
“I write … insofar as I feel I must, in order to be on a level [au pair] with

these cases, to make a pair with them.”63
(2) A definition:
“[The] real is the unconscious … [It is] something that I defined as impos-
sible. The unconscious is the impossible.”64
(3) A progression:
“I presented something which concerned Dora and then little Hans … I

[then] presented things in the form of … the Borromean knot.”65
(4) A conclusion:
“The Borromean knot is a writing. This writing supports a real.”66
To this, we might add a mantra; a rephrasing of Wittgenstein’s famous

injunction:
Whereof one cannot theorise, thereof one must present.
As points one and four make clear, this presentation is to take the form of
a writing—a writing that does not articulate the “impossible to say” but
instead presents its structure.
24 W. Greenshields
1.3 Consistence and Ex-sistence

In the final chapter of his superlative monograph, Malcolm Bowie argues
that there are “two different destinies for ‘theory’”67 in Lacan’s work:
(1) Lacan’s discourse, as a theory of desire is itself animated by theory’s desire.

“The function of desire is a last residuum of the effect of the signifier in the
subject. Desidero is the Freudian cogito.”68 The subject’s desire—or, more pre-
cisely, the subject qua desire, since this desire is all that he is—is a conse-
quence of the signifier; the prospect of wholeness and unity of being that
motivates desire is made “impossible” by the signifier; there is always “an ele-
ment necessarily lacking”69 which Lacan named the object a. We will examine
this in greater detail in the next chapter; the important point here is simply
that Lacan’s theory of desire is the theory of the impossibility of desire’s conclu-
sion. Desire’s “destiny” lays in the endless deferral of satisfaction.
Lacan’s discourse also performs theory’s desire—the desire for the whole-
ness and unity of knowledge, the desire for a complete exhaustion of the
epistemological field. However, he only does so in order to demonstrate the
impossibility of satisfying theory’s desire: “I always speak the truth. Not the
whole truth …” The destiny of the theory of/as desire is realised in its hope-
less journeying through the ‘bad’ infinity of signifiers as it attempts to totalise
itself and “say it all”: “In the first case—that of the object a in its perpetual
flight—theory finds its furtherance by giving chase to an untrappable prey,
and can easily dissolve into an endless riddling and quibbling.”70
(2) In the second case, the unsolvable “structural paradox that analytic
practice reveals”—the structural paradox whereby articulated reality and
the inarticulable real are somehow knotted together without this same sub-
jective knot amounting to a whole and unified being (i.e. desire’s
satisfaction)—rather than being imitated by the theory of/as desire, is pre-
sented by topological “devices,” such as the Borromean knot, which “lead
the theorist beyond the babble of theory and towards a state of rapt con-
templation. Before him lie topological schemata that are at once grand,
definitive and pointless. He beholds a procession of models beyond which
more models in procession extend to the horizon. In both cases theory is
brought to the brink of its own impossibility.”71
If the form in which theory’s destiny is realised markedly differs between

the two cases (incessant blathering followed by reverent mutism), the
25
structural condition of this destiny does not. In both cases, to cite the
title of Bowie’s final chapter, we are faced with the unappetising prospect
of “theory without end”; the choice is that between an infinite parade of
signifiers or topological figures extending toward an endlessly displace-
able horizon. If “theory is brought to the brink of its own impossibility,”
it remains very much on the brink, trapped in a cycle of desirous self-
proliferation. How, then, are we to understand Lacan’s insistence that
topology is a writing or presentation of the real qua impossible that deci-
sively surpasses theory? How does topology escape the fate of the signifier
(i.e. becoming just one more model among a potentially infinite number
of models, having failed to be “definitive”)? We must first grasp the dis-
tinction between the ‘bad’ infinity that exists only as a potential point on
the horizon of a geometric plane on which the inexhaustible procession
of signifiers and “models” meanders forward (as per Bowie’s metaphor)
and topology’s actualisation of infinity.
“Freud’s unconscious,” declared Lacan in 1976, “is exactly [justement]
the relationship that exists between a body that is foreign to us and
something that forms a circle, even a straight line stretching to infin-
ity, and which is the unconscious, these two things being, either way,
equivalent to one another.”72 If, as witnesses to the spectacle of a discourse
(the ‘return to Freud’) straining to do justice to a discovery by presenting
it, and, indeed, straining within and against the limitations of discursivity,
we suspend our disbelief at the sheer strangeness of its outcome and take
seriously the provocative appeal to exactitude, rather than dismissing it as
an ill-advised rhetorical flourish, an essential feature of (Lacan’s) topology
becomes apparent. Put simply, when he states that the unconscious really
is the knotting effect that a “cord” biting its own tail at an unthinkable
and unimaginable “point at infinity”73 has on “a body that is foreign to
us,” he means it. The unconscious is a topology and its topology is that of
a knot. If one remains understandably averse to following Lacan on this
point, it’s important to note that the exact equivalence postulated between
the Freudian unconscious and a knot cannot be verified by recourse to an
inexact similitude based on appearance.
The mathematical discipline of topology is concerned not with measur-
able quantity but with axiomatic qualitative relations, thereby “mak[ing]
meaning (=quantity) dependent on structure (=quality).”74 This rubber
26 W. Greenshields
geometry can entertain continuous deformation (expansion or contrac-

tion without cutting or suturing) to its quantitative form without its
qualitative structure being altered.75 For example, rings the size of a galaxy
or a bagel are topologically equivalent: the specific structure in question
(i.e. an unbroken, material contouring of a hole) remains unchanged.
We should return to a point raised in the previous section: for Lacan, the
shift from naming or “announc[ing] these things” (i.e. the registers of
the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) to writing their “mathematical
order”—that is, the structural relation between each register that persists
throughout superficial alteration—constituted progress. Not only would
topology present the real and the other registers, it would also do so pre-
cisely. Emerging from a haze of received ideas, impressionistic descrip-
tions and misconstrued quotations, Lacan’s three registers would, if all
went to plan, escape the retroactive imposition of sens that characterised
Freud’s legacy thanks to their more certain grounding in a mathemati-
cal order, their definitions owed to their structural place and relations.
The specific mathematical order here is that of a knot—a one—that only
holds together when three rings/registers are present.
Topology encourages a radically different way of thinking about
the exactitude of a postulated equivalence. In his definition of the
unconscious quoted above, Lacan argues that a circle and an infinite
straight line are equivalent. As we have noted, although these two figures
look nothing like each other, their structural effect is exactly equivalent,
insofar as a Borromean knot’s fundamental nodal quality endures regard-
less of whether it is comprised of closed rings or infinite cords. We should
not assume, however, that Lacan’s acknowledgement of the topological
equivalence between a circle and an infinite line renders his reference to
the latter figure an undermotivated superfluity. Its introduction serves
two functions: firstly, it makes strikingly apparent topology’s break with
the traditional logic of mimetic or metaphoric representation. As far as
the mathematical order of the Borromean knot is concerned, the infinite
straight line is not ‘like’ a circle; it is a circle insofar as it (as a component
of the knot) constitutes an equivalent set of structural relations. Secondly,
it exemplifies Lacan’s trenchant efforts to present the psychoanalytic sub-
ject not in terms of an ideal, enclosed totality but as a complex entity
that defies representation without being an ineffable absolute abandoned
27
to theologians (e.g. the spirit or soul). The real, we recall, is neither an

integrated element of structure and nor is it straightforwardly beyond
structure. The infinite line, by means of which “the real features,” is both
“not-all” and a necessary component for the knot to be tied. Not only
does this mathematical order have a place for the real; it depends upon it.
“[P]eople don’t manufacture closed rings of string,”76 observes Lacan
in reference both to the everyday item and the Freudian subject itself.
A ring of string was once a line of string that required its ends to be
knotted. His point is a simple one: the presence of a knot is necessary
for a ring (or circle) of string’s consistency. While we imagine ourselves
to be closed, consistent and self-conscious units, the great Freudian
insight is that we owe the irreducible singularity of our subjectivity to
a repressed nexus that our self-image or identity excludes. Our capacity
for “imaginative abstraction,” for conscious cognisance, “is so weak” that
when asked to intuitively picture a closed ring—or, that is, to imagine
ourselves—the constitutive “knot is excluded from the cord, the cord
that shows through as a residue of consistence.”77 A “whole portion of
our … réel … escapes us” and yet, in this strange structural paradox,
we cannot escape it—which is why we turn to psychoanalysts; to be
relieved of this inescapable and irretrievable knot, falsely believing that
one will ultimately ‘know thyself ’ and become a consistent being. In his
late characterisations of the ends and aims of analysis Lacan speaks not
of expunging the determinant knot but of untying and retying it—the
task being not to eradicate the real but to modify the relation to it.
Despite the fact that no satisfactory image of the “closed” infinite line
can be made, it remains an effective actuality such that the knot’s condition
of possibility (i.e. the buckling that occurs at the “point at infinity” and
which makes the knot by ensuring its qualitative nodality), rather than
being identifiable in (self-)representational reality, is real in the Lacanian
sense as somehow both actual and impossible: “[T]he real … exists as
impossible.”78 Rather than existing, the knot, to use the Heideggerian
term Lacan favoured, ex-sists as an atheistic Beyond. It is at once an effec-
tive presence and a non-recuperable illegibility, both immanent and inac-
cessible. This ex-sistent “infinity point” at which the knot is tied is thus
quite different to the potential, virtual or, more bluntly, non-existent,
infinity upon which Bowie’s characterisation of Lacan’s topology is based.
28 W. Greenshields
While it cannot be directly apprehended, it has effects and it is through

these effects that it can be discerned. The topology is “effectively knot-
ted at infinity”79: “What is the equivalence of the straight line to the
circle? It is obviously because they make a knot. This is a consequence of
the Borromean knot; it is a recourse to efficiency, to effectiveness, to the
Wirklichkeit”80—all of which is threatened when the analyst relies upon
the representational economy established by the imaginary order (i.e. a
categorisation of objects based upon the appearance of similarity and dif-
ference) rather than reading structure as a set of qualitative relations.
The unconscious, as Lacan frequently argued, does not form the foun-
dation of a Freudian ontology; it is not a consistent being, but that which
is excluded by any appeal to consistency: “The knot does not consti-
tute the cord’s consistence … [it] ex-sists relative to the cord element,
relative to the consistent cord.”81 And yet, this real that “escapes us” is
inescapable; it imposes itself upon us: “There is no consistency that is
not supported by the knot. It is in this that the knot imposes the idea
itself of the real.”82 In this tangle of apparently contradictory statements,
we learn that the real is both most fundamentally what we are and that
which is most radically alien to our self-conception: “the unconscious
ex-sists.”83 The ego (theorisable reality or imaginary consistence) and the
unconscious (untheorisable, real ex-sistence) ‘belong’ to the same sub-
ject and yet are absolutely incompatible; they cannot be joined as one
thought, knowledge or being.
However, the structural equivalence cannot be represented; we
can draw either a straight line or a circle, not both at the same time.
Therefore, any representation of the knot invariably fails to capture its
object, which, rather than being brought into existence by its image, is
successfully demonstrated, precisely through failure, as ex-sistent. There
is no ideal form of the knot, no perfect figuration of consistence and
ex-sistence, finitude and infinitude. This lends Lacan’s attempts at pre-
sentation an impermanent and dynamic quality; it allows his thought to
evade the kind of fossilisation that necessitated the return to Freud. In
other words, demonstration occurs when representation fails:
[T]he knot is not a model. What makes a knot is not imaginary, not a
representation. Besides, its characteristic—and it is in this that it escapes
29
the imaginary—is that each time I represent one, I cross it out … [T]his
shows already to what point the knot repulses us as a model … There is a
distinction between the real and reality; the knot demonstrates it.84
Like the psychoanalytic subject, each knot, in simultaneity with its

appearance, is barred and placed under erasure as a demonstrable failure
in representation. The activity of such a demonstration shrugs off the
dull lethargy into which symbolisms and models lapse, enabling Lacan,
as Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently so splendidly puts it, “to grapple with the
ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all”85—to, that is, exactly
present the Freudian unconscious as real. Of course, any such effing will
not amount to a writing of the sexual relationship.
***
For readers more familiar with the well-known element of what has
become, despite his best intentions, Lacanian theory (i.e. that the uncon-
scious is structured like a language), the above definition of the unconscious
will doubtless sound a little unusual; not least for those of us introduced
to Lacan by way of literary theory. With the topological unconscious, we
can immediately note a sharp departure not only from a reliance on ana-
logic similarity—instead of being like a language, the unconscious is now
“exactly” this topology—but also from the undeniable seduction that a
poeticised unconscious holds. Indeed, if (Lacan’s demonstration of ) the
topological unconscious “repulses” readers expecting intuitive legibility,
this is precisely because the unconscious is not reducible to any metaphori-
cal meaning produced by inexact substitutions and analogies. If this might
tempt us to mistake exactitude for a lazy ontology that tautologically says
“it is what it is” and says no more, it’s worth remembering that the uncon-
scious is an ex-sistent real rather than an existent being. Indeed, as we
will see, the unconscious arises as the consequence of the impossibility of
producing a self-identical tautology in language.
Reflecting on Roman Jakobson’s argument that Noam Chomsky had,
by branding his famous composition (“Colourless green ideas sleep furi-
ously”) semantically meaningless, neglected to account for language’s
metaphoric resonances, Lacan remarked in Seminar XII that we could,
30 W. Greenshields
if so inclined, perform a stylistic exercise and regard it as a fine charac-

terisation of the unconscious itself. After all, muses Lacan, is not psycho-
analysis testament to the fact that “sleep [is] accompanied by some fury”?
Might we not imagine that the unconscious is made up of “ideas … [or]
thoughts whose faded greenness … that, like the shades summoned from
hell and returning to the sunlight, want to drink blood, to recover their
colours”?86 Despite its laudable ingenuity, this effort is, Lacan contends,
“completely idiotic” because “[t]he unconscious has nothing to do with
these metaphorical meanings.”87 Furthermore, “to search for meaning in a
signifying, grammatical chain is an undertaking of extraordinary futility”88
since one is drawn into a hermeneutic ‘bad’ infinity without resolution,
the march toward the displaceable horizon of Bowie’s plane and the inter-
minable interpretation that Freud so feared. The meaning one searches for
is eternally deferred. Perhaps alluding to the contemporary debate that
Derrida had so forcefully initiated, Lacan posits that “one can vary to
infinity the surrounding conditions, the situation, but what is more, the
situations of dialogue, [so that] I can make [Chomsky’s] sentence mean
whatever I want.”89 Contrary to this inexhaustible reservoir of meaning,
what should be isolated is the “supporting point, the navel, as Freud would
say… [which] vanishes beneath sense.”90 While every bit as unattainable
as the final meaning, this “supporting point” is nonetheless an effective
actuality. The navel, or knot, towards which psychoanalytic interpretation
tends, is the unconscious’s ex-sistent “supporting point,” elided by a search
for a definitive or collective meaning (such as Jung’s universal symbolism).
The “point at infinity,” where the subject’s knot is (un)made, cannot be
reached by taking the path of infinite substitutions, spurred by a belief in
the meaning of meaning that would return the shades to sunlight.
Since one can vary to infinity the quantitative meaning/size of a topol-
ogy, it is hard not to feel that topology makes for an odd influence for the
psychoanalyst. However, as Lacan is at pains to point out, the statement
“‘[i]n rubber’ does not mean that everything is possible in it. Nothing
… will allow us to undo two rings linked one through the other, even
though they are in rubber … [A] logic in rubber is not condemned to
total liberty.”91 The infinite morphing that appearance can undergo is
limited by an invariant and irreducible quality that Lacan labelled the
“real-of-the-structure.”92 It is that which it is impossible for a structure to
31
both lose and remain the structure that it is. Only the limit posed by “this
notion of structure,” antithetical to any devolved sense of structure as a
socially constructed and endlessly variable artifice (the pure symbolic) or
a totalised and coherent sphere (the pure imaginary), gives Lacan “hope of
escaping” being condemned to the total liberty that would make psycho-
analysis an interminable and ineffective “swindle”—“the hope”, that is,
“of attaining to the real.”93 Topology, rather than legitimising a manic free
play of interpretation, actually helps to concentrate praxis toward what
has effects beyond the hopeless liberty or bad infinity of the Sisyphean
search for meaning.
In a session of the previous year’s Seminar (appositely titled ‘The
Freudian Unconscious and Ours’), following the prefatory remark that
“[m]ost of you will have some idea of what I mean when I say—the
unconscious is structured like a language,”94 Lacan had addressed
the stakes of his return to Freud in terms of the very same metaphor
he would subsequently dismiss; itself a metaphor recycled from The
Interpretation of Dreams: “If I may use a simile,” writes Freud, dormant
and enduring unconscious pathways, awaiting excitation, are like “the
ghosts of the underworld of the Odyssey—ghosts which awoke to new life
as soon as they tasted blood.”95 Noting that the “navel”—an infamous
Freudian metaphor transformed by Lacan into a topological real—is an
“anti-conceptual” “hole” inherent to “this topology” and that analytic
practice should isolate this “navel of the dreams” or “world of shades …
without always being able to bring them up to the light of day”96—that
is, without necessarily being given a meaningful articulation—Lacan also
insisted that “[s]ince Freud himself, the development of analytic experi-
ence has shown nothing but disdain for what appears in the gap. We
have not … fed with blood the shades that have emerged from it.”97 It is,
then, this very hole which no amount of “metaphorical meanings” can
account for, that Lacan seeks to preserve in Freud—a preservation that is
itself codified in terms of the very same “metaphorical meaning” which
the unconscious, Lacan will later insist, “has nothing to do with.” Much
is at stake in Lacan’s vacillation between a metaphorical and topological
presentation of the unconscious.
“[A] thinking that is not I: such is, from a first vague approach, the
way in which the unconscious is presented.”98 The problem with such
32 W. Greenshields
nebulous definitions and, indeed, the very word itself (unconscious) is

that they are negative and, as such, allow for a number of misconcep-
tions. For example, “a thinking that is not I” might just as conceivably be
a reference to instinct, present in beings that are not afflicted by language.
Remarking in 1973 that “Freud didn’t find a better [word], and there’s
no need to go back on it,” Lacan added that the unconscious is “a very
precise thing. There is no unconscious except for the speaking being.”99
Here, we should reassert the distinction between rigour and coherence: to
suggest that the unconscious is a “precise thing” is not the same as to sug-
gest that it is a systematisable thing. Indeed, the unconscious is a “precise
thing” because of the way in which it manifests itself is unsystematisable;
unpredictably emerging as the particular way in which each individual
“parlêtre” fails to coherently “say it all.”
In 1976, having overcome this reticence, Lacan advanced his own
redefinition: “The unconscious [inconscient] has nothing to do with
unconsciousness. So then why not … translate it by l’une-bévue [the one-
blunder].”100 This is an odd precision—a rigour without coherence. The
negative prefix (in) has been replaced by a positive entity (une), precisely
detectable in the imprecision of the analysand’s speech; negatively aris-
ing as the failure of positive meaning (a blunder) and misapprehended
by linguistic science. Indeed, this precision is only produced by Lacan’s
exploitation of the inherent imprecision of language; the homophonic
equivocation between in and une. Lacan’s redefinition does not lend the
Freudian unconscious a positive existence in reality, but an ex-sistence
repeatedly demonstrated in the clinic and persuasively documented in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. For Lacan, the “experience of the
unconscious” is realised in the “experience of speaking.”101
Within the same year (1976), Lacan proffered two ‘definitions’ of
the Freudian unconscious (as l’une-bévue and knot), both of which have
clear precedents in Freud’s work (Witz and navel) and both of which are
obscured by the search for (metaphorical) meaning. How is it that the
silent knot (“It [Ça] is only a presentation”102) and the blabbering l’une-
bévue (“ça parle”103) are equivalent? What, we ask again, has topology got
to do with psychoanalysis?
***
In the next chapter we will see how topology allowed Lacan to present
and demonstrate the structural paradoxes that define the psychoanalytic
33
subject as distinct from the subject of conscious self-apprehension and

how spatio-temporal topologies such as the Möbius strip disturb falla-
cious intuitions with a compelling force that is unmatched by language.
1.4 Notes
1. Patrick Colm Hogan, ‘Introduction: The Repression of Lacan’, in Criticism
and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure, and the Unconscious,
eds. Patrick Colm Hogan and Lalita Pandit (London: University of
Georgia Press, 1990), p. xiv.
2. Hogan, p. xiv. Unless otherwise stated, all italics are my own.
3. Jacques Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment,
trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, Jeffrey Mehlman and Annette
Michelson (New York: Norton, 1990), p. 3.
4. A pun condensing the bin (poubelle) and publication.
5. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. xx.
6. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana Press, 1991), pp. 12–13.
7. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006),
p. 263.
8. David Metzger, ‘Interpretation and Topological Structure’, in Lacan:
Topologically Speaking, eds. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milanovic (New
York: Other Press, 2004), p. 134.
9. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Mathemes: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan’, in
Lacan: Topologically Speaking, eds. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milanovic
(New York: Other Press, 2004), p. 35. Italics original.
10. SXXIV, 16/12/76.
11. SXXII, 13/5/75.
12. SXIII, 8/6/66.
13. Hogan, p. xiv.
14. Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System
of Thought, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997), p. 309.
15. Jacques Lacan, ‘Conferences in North American Universities: Yale
University: Kanzer Seminar’, unofficial, trans. Jack W. Stone, p. 2. Scilicet,
p. 9.
16. See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Purveyor of Truth’, trans. Alan Bass, in The
Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John
34 W. Greenshields
P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press), pp. 173–212.
17. SXXIII, p. 26.
18. Quoted in Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 366.
19. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, pp. 366–367.
20. Alain Badiou and Élisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, Past and Present:
A Dialogue, trans. Jason E. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press,
2014), p. 36.
21. Badiou and Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, pp. 53–55.
22. SXXIII, p. 100.
23. Ibid., p. 109.
24. SXVII, p. 117.
25. SXI, p. 53.
26. ‘From Myth to Structure’ is the title of the eighth session of Seminar XVII.
See SXVII, pp. 118–132.
27. Lacan, Television, p. 129.
28. Ibid., p. 134.
29. SXXIII, pp. 105–106.
30. Ibid., p. 102.
31. Ibid., p. 106.
32. Badiou and Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 60.
34. Ibid., p. 133.
35. Ibid., p. 130.
36. Ibid., p. 130.
37. SXXVII, 11/3/80.
39. Ibid., p. 133.
40. Badiou and Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 60.
41. Jacques Lacan, ‘Overture to the First International Encounter of the
Freudian Field, Caracas, 12 July 1980’, trans. Adrian Price, Hurly-Burly,
no. 6 (London: NLS, 2011), p. 18.
42. Lacan, ‘Overture’, p. 17.
43. SXXIII, p. 100.
45. Ibid., p. 20.
35
46. Jacques Lacan, ‘Conférence chez le Professeur Deniker, hôpital Sainte-

Anne, le 10 novembre 1978’, le Bulletin de l’Association freudienne, no. 7
(June 1984), p. 3.
47. SXVI, 4/12/68.
49. SXXV, 20/12/77.
50. SII, p. 222.
51. Lacan, ‘Conférence chez le Professeur Deniker’, p. 3.
52. Ibid., p. 3.
53. Ibid., p. 3.
54. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real’, in On the
Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 5.
55. Jacques Lacan, ‘Remarks on Hysteria’, unofficial, trans. Jack W. Stone,
p. 5. ‘Propos sur l’hysterie’, Quarto: Supplement belge à la Lettre mensuelle
de l’École de la Cause Freudienne, no. 2 (1981), p. 9.
56. Bruce Fink, ‘Translator’s Notes’, in Jacques Lacan, On the Names-of-the-
Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 98.
57. Françoise Dolto quoted in Lacan, ‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the
Real’, p. 49.
58. Lacan, ‘The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real’, p. 5.
59. Ibid., p. 6.
60. Ibid., pp. 6–7.
61. SXVI, 4/12/68.
63. SXI, p. xli.
65. Ibid., p. 3.
66. SXXII, 17/12/74.
67. Bowie, Lacan, p. 196.
68. SXI, p. 154.
69. Ibid., p. 154.
70. Bowie, Lacan, p. 195.
71. Ibid., p. 196.
72. SXXIII, p. 129. For some reason, justement has been omitted from the
translation.
73. Ibid., p. 23.
74. Alexandre Leupin, Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion (New
York: Other Press, 2004), p. 24.
36 W. Greenshields
75. Lacan’s parodic uncertainty over whether an analyst should be slightly or

very neurotic is an example of the intellectual cul de sac of quantitative
thinking.
76. SXX, p. 127.
77. SXXIII, p. 51.
78. SXXII, 13/5/75.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid., 8/4/75.
81. SXXIII, p. 51.
82. SXXII, 15/4/75.
84. SXXII, 15/4/75.
85. Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (London: Pan,
1988), p. 150.
86. SXII, 2/12/64.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Quoted in Tony Hughes, ‘The Torus—An Introduction’, The Letter: Irish
Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis 43 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 82–83.
93. Lacan, ‘Remarks on Hysteria’, p. 4. ‘Propos sur l’hysterie’, p. 9.
94. SXI, p. 20.
95. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (First Part), in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Vol. 4, trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 249.
96. SXI, pp. 22–23.
97. Ibid., p. 32.
98. SXIV, 18/1/67.
100. SXXIV, 14/12/76.
103. Lacan, Écrits, p. 571.
2
The Topology of the Psychoanalytic
Subject
2.1 The Sphere

In the second session of Seminar XXIII, having recently returned from
what he described as “my test in the US” that consisted of a series of lec-
tures and Q&As at Columbia, MIT and Yale, Lacan congratulated him-
self on having “stir[rred] up … some agitation, some emotion”1 with his
Borromean knots. Proudly revelling in his audience’s stupefaction like an
exultant tenor showered with roses, Lacan interpreted his reception as evi-
dence of the knot’s relevance and fidelity to a Freudian thought that had
originally arrived as an intellectual scandal. America—as the place where
psychoanalysis had been received not as a plague but as a curative knowl-
edge—had attracted a considerable amount of Lacan’s opprobrium over
the years and he once again took the opportunity to accuse his American
counterparts of an intellectual lassitude that was both the cause and result
of ego psychology—the theoretical doctrine according to which clinical
psychoanalysis is a matter of forcing the disorderly unconscious to bow
to the ego (an ideal model of which is provided by the analyst who has

38 Writing the Structures of the Subject: Lacan and Topology
gone through the same process). The ex-sistent knot is ironed out and
conscious (self-)knowledge reigns supreme. Lacan’s transatlantic excur-
sion was to be a counterattack, an abstruse offensive launched against the
university-citadels that had been so influential in the propagation of the
“theory of the unconscious” and “applied psychoanalysis,” leaving their
inhabitants bewildered and scandalised, disoriented by the fog of war
that the French Freud’s whirl of topological drawings threw up. Where
once the ego had bested and civilised the unconscious, topological knots
were now ranged against the geometry of the localisable centre and the
ideal form of the sphere.
Let us begin, then, with the sphere: “It is perhaps a good shape,” asserts
Lacan, “but it really is stupid!”2 Why so? With its imperforated surface
acting as a clean boundary between inside and outside, the sphere is not
a particularly Freudian object. It is too simple, too serene. It belongs to
the domain of imaginary abstraction; an illusory aspiration that inad-
equately reflects the complexities of the subject of the signifier. It is this
that the analyst must puncture with words, both in practice and in the
theory of practice. Lacan is “leading [us] along this path” with “words
which are slogans” so that we might “escap[e] from the pre-eminence
of the intuition of the sphere” that, following the Mirror Stage (i.e. the
assembly of the ego via identification with an imago), “dominates our
logic in a very intimate way.”3 Here, we can already see how (the writing
of ) topology straddles the boundary between theory and practice—how,
in other words, it functions as a didactic tool, undermining the very same
presuppositions that psychoanalytic practice takes aim at. At MIT Lacan
extended the pernicious influence of spherical intuition well beyond the
occasional drama of a glance at some reflective surface, arguing that it
informed an entire Ptolemaic Weltanschauung:
[T]o give himself an image of what he calls the world, man conceives of it
as this unity of pure form that the body represents for him. From the sur-
face of the body, man has taken the idea of a privileged form. And his first
apprehension of the world has been the apprehension of his semblable.
Then, this body, he has seen it, he has abstracted it, he has made of it a
sphere: the good form … Beyond this idea of the enveloped and envelop-
ing sack (man began with this), the idea of the concentricity of the spheres
has been its first relation to science as such.4
2 The Topology of the Psychoanalytic Subject
39
The prematurely born infant, wracked by bodily disarray, triumphs in the

illusion of consistency granted by the experience of control over his own
reflection and it is upon this “misrecognised” foundation that the “auton-
omous ego, the conflict-free sphere,”5 is erected. With the constitution
of a unified ego supported by the imaginary body, the Mirror Stage pro-
duces an observer, who, having acquired mastery over his own sphere, is
equipped to manage external stimuli via a normative economy of (self-)
representation and knowledge. This entails a process of abstraction or
generalisation that takes as its original reference point the “good form” of
the (image of the) body. Man identifies this totalisable unity everywhere
and, for Lacan, the domination of this intuition is best exemplified by
pre-Copernican science and its cosmological maps: a series of enveloped
and enveloping spheres extend from an ideal centre occupied by man.
The psychoanalyst, then, “must apprehend something of another order
than [this] spherical space”6 of the imaginary if he is not to lapse into the
same regrettable mistakes of ego psychology and further bolster this fal-
lacious model. It is on this point that topology—a truly psychoanalytic
mos geometricus—as an illustrative apparatus superior to mere “slogans,”
comes into its own.
Given that the source of egoic interiority is an image external to the
body, it is clear that the space occupied by the body is one for which
the inside/outside opposition does not hold. Furthermore, if the most
intimate foundation of the imaginary body lies outside this same body
(an ‘ideal ego,’ an image of an other, the coherent unity of which the
nascent subject will never match), any attempt to unequivocally situate
the introjecting-projecting body by means of geometrical coordinates can
only fail. Localisation in space requires an indivisible object and a clear
distinction between what is internal and external to this object. When,
in Seminar IX, Lacan derisorily referred to the “metaphor of the Innenwelt
and Umwelt,”7 he announced not just his dissatisfaction with a particular
metaphor—with the intuition that there exists a delineable inner world
and outer world being an inappropriate substitution for what is actually
at stake—but also with metaphorisation wholesale, signalling a convic-
tion that he would go on to articulate with increasing stridence—that
topology is not just a closer approximation of subjective structure but
that it is this structure.
While the subject “adores his body” because it “is his only consistency”
(this narcissistic amour-propre is “the principle of imagination”) and
“because he believes that he has it” (it is this misapprehension of self-
mastery that founds the ego), “his body will clear off at any moment.”8
The subject’s possession of his body, as a unit fixed in geometric space, is
extremely tenuous; it is discordant and porous, constantly requiring one
to “panse”9—to bandage (panser) it with egoic thought (pensé). If a free
man is defined by the fact that he is at liberty to clear off,
A slave is defined by the fact that someone has power over his or her body.
Geometry is the same thing; it has a lot to do with bodies … Slaves knew that
the master would set a price on their body; they were property, and in itself
this protected them. A slave would know that the master wasn’t about to carve
[découper] up his body: small chance his body would end up fragmented.10
While the slave is far from the ideal of self-possession and ownership—
the American Dream for which Lacan had so much disdain—he is at
least a possession, an indivisible unit, securely positioned by the geo-
metric grid of commerce and labour, his existence guaranteed by finan-
cial considerations.11 As Freud learned, the Viennese bourgeoisie did not
have it so lucky: “a structure, that of language[,] … carves [découpe] up
[the subject’s] body … Witness the hysteric.”12 There is an important
distinction between the body supposed by thought—the body that the
subject believes he has—and the body affected by thought—the body that
the subject is. This discordant unconscious thought has the structure of
language. The imaginary body—the consistent, spherical surface—is an
illusion that cannot survive what Lacan refers to as the cut (coupure) of
the signifier:
[M]an’s relations with his body holds entirely to the fact that man says that
the body … is something he has. Just saying his means that he owns it, like
a piece of furniture … This has nothing to do with anything that allows the
subject to be defined in any strict sense. The subject can be defined in a
correct fashion only … through that which means subject is a signifier
inasmuch as he is represented alongside another signifier.13
What is the topology of this subject? What is the topology of the signifier
and its cut?
41
2.2 The Interior Eight

Regarding the affinity between the imaginary and the sphere, Lacan
dramatically observed that “[e]very imaginary supposition participates
implicitly in the sphere insofar as it shines [rayonne]—Let there be
light!”14 In this quality that Lacan attributes to the sphere we should
hear not only shine or ray (as in a rayon de soleil) but another meaning
of the French rayon: radius. It is the radius that gives this egoic body its
“good form,” linking its centre to any point on the surface that separates
the interior from the outside world. The dual meaning of rayon associ-
ates visibility with ideal uniformity, efficiently summarising what is at
play in the egoic apprehension of oneself and one’s environ as a series of
enveloped-enveloping spheres.
Lacan would insist we begin with an alternative proclamation: “‘In the
beginning was the Word,’ I couldn’t agree more.”15 The word—or, more
precisely, the signifier—makes a hole in the real and we must “start with
the idea of the hole [trou]. It is to say, not Fiat lux but Fiat trou.”16 Lacan
illustrates this point by referring to the act performed by the potter, who
“creates the vase with his hand around this emptiness, creates it, just like
the mythical creator, ex nihilo, starting with a hole.”17 The potter performs
the paradigmatic creative act by forging a hole (a nothing) in simultane-
ity with a structure (a something). In other words, he forms a substance
around emptiness but this emptiness does not pre-exist the arrival of sub-
stance. What the signifier creates is not so much a substantive entity as
an emptiness that defines this entity. When, in the process Lacan termed
alienation, the subject is named—that is, represented by a signifier—he is
brought into existence, but this existence is not that of a substantive being:
once the subject appears (as represented by a signifier) he also disappears,
owing his being not to a soul or spirit but to the signifier. The being that
alienation engenders is a “lack-of-being” that exists as barred.
The conceptualisation of this insubstantial, fading subject was a vital
part of Lacan’s anti-humanist project that saw him dispense with vari-
ous inexact, synthesising concepts such as personality—products of
misleading ego identifications that clog the analytic session with self-
regarding waffle (“I’m the kind of person who…”). He was therefore
keen to formalise his theory by equating representation by the signifier
with counting:
God is not the one who made this thing that we call we call the universe.
People impute to God what is the artist’s business, the first model of which
is the potter … It is said that he moulded … this thing that is called, not
by chance, the universe. Universe means but one thing, that there is
Oneness, Yad’lun [there is something of the One], but we don’t know
where. It is more than unlikely that this One constitutes the universe.18
Stuart Schneiderman notes that the “One” at stake is neither a unify-

ing and universal meta-sphere that envelops and organises everything
nor a central, unitary sphere around which everything is concentrically
organised; rather, it “begin[s] a count. It is said that God created out
of nothing, ex nihilo. But how does God or the potter go about creat-
ing something out of nothing? Very simply by attaching a number to it,
making it a nothing, one nothing.”19 Rather than beginning with one,
the count originates with a nothing counted as one. Lacan argues that “1
is applied so well to the 0 … [T]here is nothing better than the empty
set”—a set without elements, {Ø}, a place-holder where something might
come to be—“to suggest the 1.”20 The barred subject is this empty set, a
zero without content:
[A] signifier is what represents a subject to another signifier.21

[O]ne is what is going to represent the zero for another one.22
This “lack-of-being” or zero, as that which both compels and is created by

the serial, is reconfirmed, rather than resolved, by each successive signi-
fier/number. The zero that commenced the count can never be expunged
from it.
These aphorisms add an important nuance: not only is the subject
eclipsed by the signifier but the existence (as representation) that this
signifier provides is extremely slippery. A signifier cannot signify itself; it
is instead negatively defined by its difference to other signifiers. The sub-
ject’s self-identical representation in language is interminably deferred:
any search for final meaning—the attempt to exactly represent oneself—
is doomed to hopelessly navigate the ‘bad’ infinity of re-presentation. “In
the beginning was the Word”—the signifier, abbreviated by Lacan as S1,
that represents the subject as “one nothing” to another signifier (S2).
43
If the concise minimalism of the two aphorisms quoted above helps

to lend Lacan’s discourse the appearance of exactitude, this is, to a cer-
tain extent, only ever feigned. Conveyed in language, the aphorisms are
subject to the very same dynamic of slippage that they attempt to repre-
sent—as confirmed by the fact that two statements have been deployed
to say the same thing. Lacan’s response to the difficulty of theorising
the insubstantial subject was not to represent it but to demonstrate it
with topology.
We can refer here to the simplest of Lacan’s topological figures: the
interior eight—a line that, rather than returning to its starting point
to produce an closed circle or “good form,” misses this origin and only
returns after having made an additional loop (Fig. 2.1).
A signifier is inherently binary since it requires a second signifier for
its sense to be retroactively apparent. In other words, the presentation is
only established by its displacement in the re-presentation. The temporal
logic that governs signification is silently captured by the interior eight
which adds an extra loop (a≠a) to the circle’s tautology (a=a). There are
“two times” that constitute the barred subject (as that which one signifier
represents to another signifier): the conjunction of the “first stroke [trait]
and of what effaces it.”23 The “first stroke” or first time only exists by vir-
tue of its being effaced in representation: there occurs an “[e]rasure of no
trace that might be in advance.”24 The “one unique time”25 of “signifying
uniquity”26 is made impossible by the logic of the signifier.
This topology presents the minimal temporal combinatorial that con-
stitutes and obscures the subject, not in terms of a substance, image or
S1 S1 S2 S1 S2
S
Fig. 2.1 The Interior Eight (Lacan’s earliest reference to this figure comes in
SIV, 10/4/57. It can also be found in the English translation of SXI, p. 156)
metaphor but an axiomatic logic of the signifier. Topology is thus called

upon to present this logic on the condition that it is not subject to this
logic (of differential displacement). Miller argues that “topology cannot
be isolated in the teaching of Lacan. Topology is introduced with the
signifier; wherever there is no signifier; wherever there is no ‘capture’ on
the part of the symbolic, topology is unnecessary; in such cases … the
sphere and the plane will suffice.”27 In Lacan’s work topology is inextri-
cably bound to the signifier without, for all that, being of the signifier. It
is a presentation of the failure of presentation that must somehow avoid
this very failure that sees every presentation become a re-presentation.
Miller offers a revealing reflection on the difficulty of “[s]ustaining a
discourse that induces a disjunction of subject and substance”—recall
here that the barred subject is merely “one nothing” that a signifier repre-
sents for another signifier—remarking that upon trying to find an exam-
ple of such a discourse that did so “without recourse to mathemes”28 he
arrived at that of Sartre, who, Miller contends, attempted to “isolate”
this being qua lack-of-being (the subject that never coincides with itself )
through the “magic of style,” exemplified by a number of “successful
metaphors”29; a rhetorical gymnastics that produced formulations that
appear to loop around their object, endlessly re-presenting the problem-
atic of representation itself. This is one such, and by no means remark-
able, passage:
[T]he pure event by which human reality rises as a presence in the world is
apprehended by itself as its own lack … It apprehends itself as being in so
far as it is not, in the presence of the particular totality which it lacks and
which it is in the form of not being it and which is what it is. Human
reality is a perpetual surpassing toward a coincidence with itself which is
never given. If the cogito reaches toward being, it is because by its very thrust
it surpasses itself toward being by qualifying itself in its being as the being
to which coincidence with self is lacking in order for it to be what it is.30
For Miller, the interior eight’s double-loop is the most efficient method
of capturing self-difference and is “not a supplementary complexity” but
a “simplification that frees us from 600 pages of rhetoric such as Sartre’s
in Being and Nothingness.”31
45
The question that should be asked, however, is whether topology sur-

passes the relative banality of an efficiency saving and is superior to lan-
guage per se; that is, no matter how compact or voluminous. Certain
of Lacan’s statements seem to suggest that topology retains a suitability
that makes it not merely a more refined version of what has already been
formulated in language: there is “a very particular mode of the subject
for which the only index I have found is topological.”32 In Seminar XIII
Lacan pulls back slightly by offering topology as an aid to “establish-
ing fundamental relationships … with a rigour which has never been
obtained up to now in ordinary language.”33 The gap between these two
positions is not insurmountable. Lacan’s aphorisms—as the results of an
effort to attain a rigour through ordinary language—always convey or, at
the very least, imply, a topology. Statements such as “a signifier is what
represents a subject to another signifier” or “the desire of the subject is the
desire of the Other” refer to non-Euclidean “fundamental relationships”
between terms—a topology, in other words. In this respect, not only is
topology not a “supplementary complexity,” it is not a supplement at all
since it is primary to language, it is the set of fundamental relationships
that Lacan’s language, as a supplementary complexity or simplification
(depending on one’s point of view), re-presents. Therefore, if one only
asks (as many sceptical critics do) “what is the value of the topological
supplement to Lacan’s renovation of the foundations of psychoanalytic
thought” or “what does topology add to Lacan’s presentation,” one risks
missing the point entirely which is that Freud’s discovery of the subject
of the unconscious was the discovery of fundamental relationships that
cannot be established geometrically. Lacan’s response was to firm up or
illuminate those relationships that Freud’s work conveyed or implied,
establish additional relationships and ask how an analyst should proceed
in “the topology of our experience.”34
Indeed, it is perhaps the economic benefit that is most uncertain since
Lacan’s topology requires explanation. As he admits, while “[m]athemati-
cal formalisation is our goal,” this same writing “only subsists if I employ,
in presenting it, the language I make use of. Therein lies the objection: no
formalisation of language is transmissible without language itself.”35 Must
“metaphorical meanings” return to rescue topology from a mute obscu-
rity? If, accepting here the argument that topology is a supplementary
simplicity, topological formalisation is a metalanguage of the language

he uses (as a meta account of an object), the language he uses is also an
explanatory metalanguage of this formalisation itself (again, as a meta
account of an object) such that, whatever mode of language he uses—be
it formal or “ordinary”—the “ideal metalanguage” is made to “ex-sist”36
as a real excluded by both these modes. We might think here of Lacan’s
two aphorisms: if the second is a formalisation of the first (i.e. the defini-
tion of “zero” or {Ø} is more concrete in mathematics than the definition
of “subject” is in psychoanalytic thought), the first must nevertheless be
kept in mind if the second is to have any value (i.e. we must know that
when Lacan says “subject” he really means “zero” and vice versa).
While topology is supposedly not subject to the same communicative
failure that befalls language and can therefore be “integrally transmit-
ted” without remainder, this transmission cannot take place as an ideal
telepathic silence—it requires “speech”37 as a descriptive metalanguage to
constitute and account for it. As such, a dizzying mise en abyme occurs in
which topology shares the fate of “signifying uniquity” inasmuch as the
realisation of its presentation is displaced by representation. The inte-
rior eight would rejoin the language that it formalises as an exemplary
instance of this very same linguistic mechanism that it formalises. We
can see how topology appears as an unsuccessful accessory to the flesh of
Lacan’s teaching, rather than the skeletal structure that holds it together,
when it is apprehended as an attempt at an efficient metalanguage, a
supplementary simplicity that supposes to achieve what “ordinary” lan-
guage cannot.
2.3 The Möbius Strip

For Lacan, “the unconscious [is] the logical implication of language.”38 It
is, in other words, a consequence of the signifier’s differential logic. The
subject’s identification with a signifier (referred to variously as the master
signifier, the primordial signifier or S1), in the process of alienation neces-
sary for the subject to acquire symbolic existence—to appear in, and be
recognised by, the field of the Other in which he speaks and is spoken
47
of—is imperfect since this signifier only subsists under the erasure of
re-presentation. It is precisely this failure of presentation that establishes
the unconscious: “Urverdrängung, or primal repression, is the following:
what a signifier represents for another signifier.”39 The signifiers that orig-
inally determined the subject are lost to him and yet they will continue
to obliquely haunt his speech.
The subject’s attempts to achieve a self-identical existence in language
(by saying who he is, what he means and what he wants) that would be
recognised by the Other, are doomed to failure precisely because these
attempts are spoken. The subject cannot produce a metalanguage that
would integrally transmit his identity. The imaginary One (the ego-
sphere) is undermined by l’une-bévue; the subject blunders, the meaning
of his speech is not unequivocal and it is by these failures of representation
that the ex-sistent unconscious is demonstrated. The speaking subject is
not One: he is divided and psychoanalysis is tasked with accounting for
“what it is in this division that makes for something real”40—the impos-
sibility of wholly presenting oneself by means of the differential signi-
fier. Both theory and practice are subject to an Urverdrängung that is
impossible to resolve: should either be instigated and developed from
the platform of the “philosophical error” (i.e. supposing a subject that
“identif[ies] with his consciousness”), they will “miss the topology which
makes a fool of [the subject] in that identification”—the fundamental,
but also paradoxical and unfamiliar, relationships without which “it is
impossible to grasp anything of the real of the economy.”41
The topology of this real of the signifying economy—that is, the
impossibility of the signifier that represents the subject coinciding
with itself—that divides the subject is Möbian and can be realised by
transforming the double-looped line of the interior eight into the edge
of a surface (Fig. 2.2):
The Möbius strip’s popular reputation derives from the corrective that
closer study of its structure issues to our immediate apprehension of its
image. Tracing a journey around the strip from, and back to, any given
point on its surface, we cross what we assume to be the ‘other side’ of
the surface without puncturing it. Dynamic demonstration disproves
our perception of good form: what seemed, like the sphere, to have two
interior eight Möbian surface

(line without points) (lines without points)
Fig. 2.2 The Möbius strip (An alternative depiction can be found in SX, p. 97
and, indeed, on the cover of this same seminar. Readers are encouraged to
make their own)
distinct sides turns out to be unilateral. It thus requires a second circuit

of the hole—the additional loop figured by the interior eight—to return
to one’s origin, having missed it the first time around. Furthermore, this
journey makes a mockery of our attempts to identify anything so unitary
and stable as a ‘point.’ Since each topographical binary that would usually
allow us to discern and distinguish one point from another is null and
void (due to its seamless reversibility, there is no front and reverse side or
left and right edge, but only one side and one edge), this surface is a “a
series of lines without points.”42 Just as there is no self-identical signifier,
“[t]here is not one of these points where the one and the other are not
united”43: the surface is non-orientable; all points are simultaneously on
both the front and reverse, the left and right.
Recalling the procedure necessary for the strip’s construction (a
bilateral length of paper is given a half-twist before its ends are struck
together), this topology’s axiomatic “real-of-the-structure,” to which its
Möbian quality is owed, becomes evident: it is the twist, which, as Jack
Stone elegantly explains, ex-sists as a real both actual and absent from
observable reality:
[T]he Möbius strip is defined not in terms of any fixed locus or loci but by
a twist displaceable throughout its length … We cannot pinpoint this twist
in any definitive manner without the surface or line losing its Möbian
nature. The twist, thus, is the real of the Möbius strip, a real as inaccessible
as the point at infinity which would make [an] infinite line a circle, but also
a concrete actuality … Though we can scarcely imagine how, it allows this
49
form to both ‘exist,’ as a real object we can hold in our hand, and to ex-sist,
in the tactile and conceptual demonstration of its impossibility, of its irre-
solvable structural paradoxes.44
To paraphrase Lacan’s clever formulation that we quoted in 1.2, one

thing cannot escape us at the outset and this is that the twist escapes us.
If, according to Lacan’s idiosyncratic re-packaging of modal logic, the
necessary is what “doesn’t stop being written” and the impossible is what
“doesn’t stop not being written,”45 the Möbian twist is both necessary
and impossible, both essential to the structure and impossible to grasp.
As we examine this topology that defies the laws of geometry, we find, to
our frustration, that the fact that the twist doesn’t stop not being written
doesn’t stop being written. It is, in other words, not simply absent from
the structure for it has made this structure what it is. While it is, strictly
speaking, nowhere (it being unlocalisable), its effects are discernable
everywhere—it is, to use one of Lacan’s neologisms “nullibiquitous.”46
It is the “real-of-the-structure” of language guaranteeing that there is no
self-identical signifier/point.
So, what we have here is a structure warped and qualitatively defined
by an inexpungeable real ensuring that the space of recto and verso are
separated only by the time it takes to navigate a closed circuit rather than
being unequivocally distinct like the interior and exterior of a sphere. In
reference to this topology Lacan makes three proposals which we shall
introduce:
(1) The structure of language, or better, the “real-of-the-structure” of

language, is Möbian.
(2) The divided subject results from a cut applied to this structure.
(3) Psychoanalytic interpretation is a cut.
We can demonstrate the first proposal by examining what at first

appears to be a very straightforward signifying chain: “a man is a man.”47
As we read this tautology we get the distinct impression that the first
man is not the same as the second man and that the attempt at “signify-
ing uniquity,” the attempt to force a signifier to signify itself, has failed.
Despite the fact that both men are presented as a single unit—that is,
the men are each “a man”—what we feel is being posed here is the link
between a particular entity and a general concept, the definition of the
former through recourse to the latter. There is both a surfeit of potential
meaning—as the signifying chain encourages its recipient to ask enor-
mous questions about the relation between the particular (man) and the
general (man)—and a deficit or deferral of meaning, as one is still left
asking “what is a man?”
A signifying chain operates through anticipation and retroaction: a
signifier (S or “a man”) anticipates the meaning that its combination
(“is”) with another signifier (S′ or “a man”) in a chain will retroactively
confer. This loop, Lacan argues, is Möbian. Embarking from our point
of departure—a signifier (S or “a man”) that we will return to, a signi-
fier that cannot fulfil its signifying function until we do so—we find
ourselves on the ‘underside’ of this point, at the place of another signifier
(S′ or “a man”) that the first anticipates and requires, before returning,
using this second signifier to retroactively confer meaning on the first.
However, the meaning of the first signifier has not been resolved by a
circuit that is every bit as problematic as it is necessary (necessary because
a signifier produces meaning through its combination with other sig-
nifiers—problematic because the meaning produced is both too much
and too little). A man (once we have completed the Möbian course of
anticipation-retroaction) is a man but this man has been made somehow
different to himself. Furthermore, the copula in this chain—the “is” that
links subject (“a man”) and predicate (“a man”), supposedly granting one
access to the identity of the subject—occupies the space of the twist that
flips us from topside to underside, from one signifier to another signifier.
The subject that is constituted through his entry into the symbolic
finds that the stability of egoic identity cannot survive being expressed by,
or transplanted into, language. Communications of identity that take the
form of a copula (e.g. “I am a worthy man”) reveal an ineradicable divi-
sion between subject (“I”) and predicate (“worthy man”), a split between
one signifier and another signifier. We might recall here Lacan’s conten-
tion that the analyst should not “rely on the reality expressed by the fol-
lowing—that a subject … [is,] as the Chinese say, xian da, a worthy man,
or, xiao ren, an unworthy man.” While the divided subject, as that which
51
one signifier represents for another signifier, finds meaning in the sym-
bolic, this meaning is always incomplete and equivocal and it is in this
lack of (complete) meaning that the subject encounters his lack-of-being,
the impossibility of expressing or discovering oneself as signifying uniq-
uity. As Lacan puts it, there can be no “ontotautology,”48 no immaculate
circle that does not twist to another ‘side,’ another signifier. The loop only
“closes on the basis of its inverted redoubling.”49
We can now begin to understand Lacan’s dual claim that the sub-
ject is the hypokeimenon of the signifying chain and that topology is the
hypokeimenon of the psychoanalytic field. In Seminar XVII Lacan stated
that if a signifier “represents a subject … for another signifier … there
is nothing in common between the subject of knowledge [connaissance]
and the subject of the signifier.”50 In other words, the imaginary subject
of self-knowledge,51 the subject qua ego, bears no relation to the lack-
of-being that results from “the real of the [signifying] economy,” “the
topology,” this fundamental Möbian relation linking signifiers, “which
makes a fool of [the subject] in that identification.” Nonetheless, con-
tinues Lacan, “[t]here is no way of escaping this extraordinarily reduced
formula that there is something underneath. But precisely, there is no
term that we can designate this something by. It cannot be an etwas, it is
simply an underneath, a subject, a hypokeimenon.”52 Here, we can witness
Lacan struggling with the impossible task of finding the right signifier
for that which is created by the inherent incapacity of signifiers. We even
find, in the second option provided by Lacan’s final sentence, a familiar
tautology: a subject is a subject! Rather than grasp the subject, Lacan has
reproduced the very move that constitutes the subject as ungraspable.
What he required was a non-signifying support that demonstrated this
insubstantial, fading hypokeimenon that paradoxically only emerges by
means of its own disappearance. Names or descriptions (e.g. “a subject is
…”, “a man is …”, etc.) could only fail because their functioning would
rely on precisely the same presupposition that he was countering. Such a
support would have to materialise the temporal logic of the differential
signifier and somehow present the absent result of this logic: “There are
structures … namely, what happens by virtue of a fundamental relation,
the one I define as the relation of one signifier to another. And from this
there results the emergence of what we call the subject.”53
We have seen how the Möbius strip achieves the former—how, that is, it
offers not a signifier of the logic of the signifier but actually is the topology,
the paradoxical but fundamental relation, of this logic—but have yet to see
how it achieves the latter. If we look at some of Lacan’s graphs of desire, such
as that on page 681 of Écrits, we can see that the barred subject is explicitly
present as the underneath, the hypokeimenon, of the signifying chain. He
has been written. In both the interior eight and the Möbius strip, however,
he is absent. The topologies are apparently solely given up to a demonstra-
tion of the logic of the signifier. In Seminar XIII Lacan, tackling the ques-
tion of whether or not his use of topology was metaphorical, argued that
“the structures in question have the right to be considered as belonging to
the order of a hypokeimenon, of a support, indeed, of a substance of what
constitutes our field.”54 The psychoanalytic field is characterised by certain
fundamental relations. However, it is not enough to merely establish struc-
ture, the psychoanalyst must also be able to account for action in structure
and recognise the emergence of the subject.
Producing a cut that begins halfway between (what we wrongly under-
stand to be) the Möbius strip’s two edges and traverses the length of the
strip, we end up with a bilateral strip twice the length of the original
strip. Even more perplexingly, we can see that the line taken by our cut is
equivalent to the line of the interior eight and that it acts as the edge of a
Möbian gap where once it had been the edge of a Möbian surface. There
has been a transition from the surface of a series of “lines without points”
to a void (Fig. 2.3).
interior eight
Möbian void
median cut
Fig. 2.3 Cutting the Möbius strip

53
A particular line has been taken (e.g. “a man is a man” or “I am a

worthy man,” etc.) and a gap has opened up between these two signi-
fiers, these two ‘sides’ of the Möbius strip now figured by the two loops
of the interior eight (the topology of self-difference). An articulation by
means of which the subject presents himself in the symbolic field (thereby
becoming a subject) acts as just such a cut: the subject of the signifier is
“the subject of the cut … The subject, like the Möbius strip, is what
disappears”—or what appears by disappearing—“in the cut … he is in
the cancelling-out that the cut represents.”55 One can easily imagine that,
when cutting a paper Möbius strip, the moment that the cut is complete,
the Möbian gap that this cut has been creating and demarcating will col-
lapse. The line taken in anticipation from one signifier to another signi-
fier and then in retroaction back to the first signifier, rather than grasping
a fullness of meaning that would annul the lack-of-being, only circum-
scribes a void that vanishes in simultaneity with its creation.
The double-looped line without points of the cut traces the edge of the
surface of lines without points, an edge that, following the cut, becomes
the edge of a void. Each articulation, each traversal of the Möbian struc-
ture of language, regardless of the fact that it is, as a median cut, initiated
amidst a vast symbolic surface, a limitless series of lines-without-points,
always, once the line (qua cut) that has been taken has retroactively
looped back upon itself, becomes an edge phenomenon, an articulation
that produces the inarticulable:
[T]he edge alone constitutes the surface. This is easy to demonstrate by the
fact that if you make a cut through the middle of this surface, this cut itself
concentrates in itself the essence of the double loop. Being a cut, which …
‘turns back’ onto itself, it is itself—this single cut—just by itself, the whole
of the Möbius surface.56
The equivalence Lacan draws between the cut and the Möbius strip reflects
his concern that structure should not simply be thought of as an a priori
space inhabited by the subject. Structure, as a signifying combinatorial, a
Möbian trajectory of “inverted redoubling,” is an action from which the
subject emerges as an effect. We should therefore nuance the second of
what we have presented as Lacan’s three proposals: the cut is not applied
to structure, it is structure in action. After all, it is only when we have
completed a circuit of the Möbius strip (rather than merely looked at it as

a given object) that the true nature of its structure becomes apparent. For
those approaching this topology for the first time, the structure does not
pre-exist the circuit; it instead reveals itself upon the circuit’s completion.
Similarly, the logic of the signifier, the necessity of a chain’s anticipation-
retroaction, is only instantiated by an articulation.
***
Why would Lacan argue that psychoanalytic interpretation operates
through just such a cut—a cut that only induces the subject’s lack-of-
being rather than resolving it through the construction of meaning? At
this point it is worth briefly rehearsing the alterations Lacan made to
the basic unit of Saussurean linguistics, the sign. In Saussure’s model the
signified sits above the signifier and these two elements of the sign are
surrounded by a circle, which serves to emphasise that the sign is a self-
enclosed unit, and are bordered by two vertical arrows (one pointing up
and the other pointing down) indicating a reciprocity. Therefore, the pro-
duction of meaning is relatively straightforward since it is the result of a
union between the sound one makes (signifier) and the concept (signi-
fied) that one associates with this sound. In constructing his own formula
Lacan ditches the circle and the arrows but preserves the bar and switches
the position of the sign’s two elements so that the signifier (S) has priority
over the signified (s): S/s. The bar between signifier and signified dislo-
cates the Saussurean sign. Whereas for Saussure the link between signifier
and signified was arbitrary but binding, for Lacan “the signifier is posited
only insofar as it has no relation to the signified.”57 As Ed Pluth explains,
while Saussure’s sign is “the primary unit of meaning,” Lacan’s signifier,
because its “difference from other signifiers is considered to be prior to
any possible link between a signifier and whatever meaning or signified
might end up being associated with it,” is “essentially meaningless.”58
In Seminar XX Lacan stated that “[t]he signifier … must be structured
in topological terms” and that the signifier can have “a meaning effect
[effet de signifié]”—it can still evoke meaning or produce the impression
of an attachment to a signified being realised—even if “there is something
barred that must be crossed over.”59 Now, while the fundamental rela-
tionship referred to here is undoubtedly that which defines the algorithm
55
S/s (Lacan will speak of S, s and the bar each having a “place”60), it is
also more than likely that Lacan is alluding to the Möbius strip, having
spent a significant amount of time in previous seminars arguing that “this
topology is essential to the structure of language.”61
For meaning to be produced the bar must be crossed. In Saussure’s sign
the bar between signifier and signified is always already crossed because
these elements are, to deploy an illustration that Saussure himself relied
upon, like two sides of the same sheet of paper: while these two sides
are distinct, they are also as one, subsisting as interdependent parts of the
same unit. Giving each of the elements of Lacan’s formula a “place” in
Möbian structure—where S and s occupy what we perceive to be the top-
side and underside of the surface while the bar is materialised by the sur-
face’s edge—we can account for how meaning is produced without lapsing
into the good form of the sign’s circle or the bilateral surface. This might
appear to stand in contradiction to what we have just established: while
the elements of the Saussurean sign were part of the same structure they at
least occupied different sides—not only are Lacan’s signifier and signified
part of the same structure these ‘sides’ are now no longer even distinct!
However, this topologisation of S/s in fact emphasises a particular qual-
ity of the fundamental relationship between signifier and signified which
is that the signifier has priority over the signified. The key word in the
expression “effet de signifié” is effect: the signified is not an equal partner
here, it is not a distinct element that binds with the signifier to produce a
sign; it is instead an effect, an impression, that emerges from the signifier.
Metaphor—as the mechanism that produces an effet de signifié through
the substitution of one signifier for another signifier—would be a Möbian
closed circuit that departed from a signifier (the signifier that has been
substituted out) and returned to a signifier (the signifier that has been
substituted in) having traversed a signified that sits not so much under a
signifier as between signifiers as the result, the effect, of their combination.
However, while this particular reading of Lacan’s insistence that “[t]
he signifier … must be structured in topological terms” (which some of
Lacan’s readers have taken up62) allows us to see how the meaning pro-
duced by a combination of signifiers is not that of the sign and gives a
dynamic demonstration of a “crossing of the bar”63 that does not treat the
bar as a geometrical demarcation of neatly distinct compartments, it does
misleadingly introduce a temporal aspect into the synchrony of metaphor

and, more importantly, makes for a very poor model of interpretation. If
interpretation functions as a median cut that traverses the length of the
strip, transforming it from a unilateral surface to a bilateral surface, the
result would be a return to the Saussurean sign (the two-sided unit) and
the restoration of meaning, the binding of signifier to signified.
At this point we should introduce metonymy, the formula of which
Lacan provided in ‘The Instance of the Letter’64:
f ( S…S′ ) S ≅ S ( — ) s

I have simply added the relevant letters to Dylan Evans’ concise defini-
tion of this formula: “the signifying function [f] of the connection of the
signifier with the signifier [(S … S′)] is congruent with [≅] the mainte-
nance of the bar [—] between signifier [S] and signified [s].”65 Metonymy
(as the diachronic linking of signifiers in a chain) endlessly defers the
meaning effect; the subject can never “say it all” or, indeed, say it, there
are always more (suitable) signifiers, more (suitable) combinations, the
totalisation of meaning or the realisation of unitary and unambiguous
meaning eludes him.
What awaits the subject on the ‘other side’ of the Möbius strip is not
the signified of one signifier (S or “a man”) but just another signifier (S′
or “a man”). The crossing of the bar from one side to the other has been
illusory: whereas from a local perspective the Möbius strip appears to
have two sides, from a global perspective—a perspective acquired once
the signifying circuit of anticipation-retroaction has been completed—it
has only one. The bar, as the edge of the Möbius strip, does not separate
two distinct sides (as it does as the edge of Saussure’s bilateral piece of
paper), it instead, as the single edge of a single surface, separates this sur-
face from a void. The bar thus becomes a “real edge”66—real in the sense
that it is impossible to defeat. Indeed, insofar as the signifying articula-
tion qua cut is a line without points equivalent to this edge of the strip,
“the connection of the signifier with the signifier” is not just “congru-
ent with the maintenance of the bar,” it is a pure instantiation of the
bar, the bar incarnate. The line-without-points is a quantitative reduction
57
of language’s infinite potential (the lines-without-points) that nonethe-

less retains the qualitative “real-of-the-structure” of this Möbian surface.
This, then, is the true other side of the signifier: the void that the cut of
the signifier creates. The effet de signifié of the divided subject’s verbalised
presentation of himself is a gap, an effect that emerges from the combi-
nation of signifiers (the inability of signifiers to signify themselves) but
nonetheless remains beyond these signifiers.
As noted, a further consequence of this cut is to produce a bilateral
strip—but, unlike the Saussurean model, this surface offers only signifiers
that are to be read by the psychoanalyst as detached from any supposed
meaning effect. The smooth continuity of the Möbian surface—that
is, the signifying chain producing either the impression of a meaning
effect (metaphor) or the promise of a meaning effect that is intermina-
bly deferred (metonymy)—is subverted so that signifiers are cut from
another. No longer occupying the same surface, the signifiers are to be
considered not only in their detachment from any meaning effect but
also in their detachment from the combinations that create such effects.
As Lacan put it, the analyst works with “a fragmented signifying chain
[and] its interpretable elements.”67
Noting Lacan’s insistence that “there would not be metaphor if it
weren’t for metonymy”68 because “metaphor requires a signifying chain
(something in which a bar between signifier and signified is established
and maintained) in order to create the effect of a crossing of the bar,” and
that, in any case, metaphor is itself based upon a combination of signi-
fiers that produces a signified effect that exceeds these signifiers—poetic
metaphor, for example, inspires interpretation and inquiry rather than
establishing unequivocal meaning—Pluth argues that in both metonymy
and metaphor what actually lurks on the ‘other side’ of the Möbius strip
is always another signifier.69 This is doubtless why, in ‘Radiophonie’,
Lacan follows a summary of these two mechanisms with a dense outline
of a single mode of interpretation; “the interpretative cut”:
For it is only from this cut that this surface, where from every point one has
access to its reverse side, without having to pass over an edge (thus it has a
single surface), is seen afterwards provided with a recto and a verso. The
Freudian double inscription thus would not spring from any Saussurean
barrier, but from the practice itself that poses the question of it namely the
cut from which the unconscious in desisting testifies to have only consisted
of the cut, that is, the more discourse is interpreted, the more it confirms
itself to be unconscious. To the point that only psychoanalysis would dis-
cover that there is a reverse [envers] side to the discourse—on the condition
of interpreting it.70
The structural quandary of “Freudian double inscription”—the ques-

tion of how an “unconscious idea” that is “quite incapable of entering
the preconscious” can nonetheless “exercise [an] effect there by estab-
lishing a connection with an idea which already belongs to the precon-
scious, by transferring its intensity on to it and by getting itself ‘covered’
by it”71—could not be resolved by a topographical representation that
would place a signifier (“unconscious idea”) and another signifier (“an
idea which already belongs to the preconscious”) that “covers” it (through
a metaphorical substitution) in two separate domains. Replacing a static
topography, the structure of the Möbius strip reveals itself in the time of
a circuit: surfaces that locally (or at the point of departure) appear to be
distinct, turn out to be (through the time of substitution or the transfer-
ral of “intensity”) in continuity with one another. The spatio-temporal
paradox materialised by the strip thus improved on both topographical
and functional accounts of double inscription. The “interpretative cut”
would therefore entail a return to the spatial distinction undone by the
time of transferral—the separation of signifier (unconscious idea) from
signifier (preconscious covering) and an undoing of the meaning effect
produced by metaphor.
The key to understanding this difficult passage and, in particular,
Lacan’s reference to the “reverse side” of a “discourse” lies in the fact that,
in same the year of its writing, Lacan presented the seventeenth semi-
nar, The Other Side [L’envers] of Psychoanalysis, and what he called the
four discourses. While we will examine these discourses in greater detail
in Chap. 3, a brief look at these discourses is sufficient to confirm that
Lacan intended the movement of reversal to be taken quite literally: the
reverse side of the analyst’s discourse is the master’s discourse—the let-
ters on the top and the bottom, the right and the left, reverse their posi-
tion (see Fig. 3.2). For our purposes here, we need only focus on what
happens to S1 and S2. S1 and S2 are what came to replace a signifier (S)
59
and another signifier (S′) in the topology that we have been examining
(i.e. “a signifier is what represents a subject to another signifier”). There
was more at stake than a simple updating of terminology: S2 now stood
for the ensemble of signifiers, the potentially limitless combinations of
differential units that can produce meaning effects and knowledge, while
S1 stood for the master-signifier that can either be introduced into S2 or
extracted from it. The master’s discourse relies upon the former opera-
tion: a master-signifier—a name, command or guiding principle—comes
to dominate the other signifiers (S2). This domination imposes a syn-
thetic consistency; the master(-signifier) is an artificially fixed point of
reference for meaning effects and knowledge. Being the reverse of the
master, the analyst, rather than welding S1 to S2, cuts the former from the
latter, isolating the subject’s master-signifier from the signifying chains
that unfold in analysis. The relation between S1 and S2 is posed on the
bottom half of the analyst’s discourse so it is worth noting that, according
to Lacan, “there is a barrier … on the lower level.”72 In Seminar XVII this
barrier is written as a black triangle.
The “interpretative cut” that produces a surface with a reverse side is
thus concordant with a reversal of discourses: whereas the master proceeds
on the basis of a “Saussurean barrier”—a bar between signifier and signi-
fied that can be definitively crossed by combining S1 and S2—the analyst
imposes a Möbian cut, a “real edge,” demarcating the lack-of-being and
extricating what Tom Eyers has called the “signifier-in-isolation” from the
“signifier-in-relation”:
[T]he signifier-in-relation designates the signifier as it exists negatively,

defined purely by relation to other signifiers and producing meaning as the
result of its perpetual displacement along the axes of metaphor and meton-
ymy, while signifier-in-isolation designates the signifier as Real, isolated in
its material element away from the networks of relation that render it con-
ducive to meaning.73
Lacan would eventually come to refer to the “signifier-in-isolation” as

a unit not of language but of lalangue. In Seminar XX he spoke of a
“buzzing swarm” of S1s,74 not a combination of signifiers (the “signifier-
in-relation”) but a combination of letters—that is, signifiers isolated in
their “material element.” These letters, arranged by phonetic identity
(materiality) rather than in accordance with the rules that govern the
production of meaning effects (relationality), present themselves to be
read by the analyst in the homophonic equivocations of the analysand’s
speech. Analysts looking for a paradigmatic example of lalangue are
directed by Lacan to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: “What happens in
Joyce’s work? The signifier stuffs the signified.”75 Not only is the signifier
on both ‘sides’ of the Joycean Möbius strip—that famously “returnally
reprodictive”76 circuit that departs from and returns to the “riverrun,”77
endlessly deferring (fin negans) a final effet de signifié—these signifiers also
refuse to combine with one another in accordance with the linguistic
tropes that would produce local meaning effects.
Partly because we are in danger of eliding a vital topological distinc-
tion between the insubstantial subject of the signifier and the subject of
lalangue and “the enjoying [jouissante] substance,”78 our exploration of
the topology of interpretation must be brought to an inelegant halt here,
with the promise that we shall return to it in later chapters. In concluding
this section we will look again at Lacan’s contention that topology is the
hypokeimenon of the psychoanalytic field.
***
In an écrit titled ‘Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation’ (1960),
Lacan distinguished his topology from two opposed methods of
apprehending structure. The first of these supposes “a structure that is in
some sense apparent”79 and thus amenable to description, a visible good
form that presents itself to be discerned by the analyst just as a land-
mark building does for a tourist. A topology is not graspable by means
of trivial and quantitative “descriptive characteristics”80—it matters not a
jot whether the Möbius strip is big or small, red or blue, only that it can
be defined by means of a qualitative “real-of-the-structure” (i.e. the ex-
sistent twist) to which it owes its materialisation of an irresolvable spatio-
temporal paradox that makes it a Möbius strip. Lacan often encouraged
his audience to make and manipulate the topological figures themselves
so that they could experience, through a dynamic demonstration, what
the static exhibition of “a structure that is in some sense apparent” elides
(i.e. that recto and verso—consciousness and the ‘other stage’—are joined
by the time of a signifying chain’s anticipation-retroaction rather than
being distinguished by a spatial compartmentalisation that mistakenly
61
disjoins one from the other). The second mode entails a “‘theoretical
model,’” “a structure … located at some distance from experience.”81
The structure with which Lacan was concerned could not be abstracted
from experience; it was the structure of the psychoanalytic experience,
the experience of speaking.
Lacan argued that “this antinomy” between a structure that is directly
apparent and a structure that can only be reconstructed as an abstract
model “neglects a [third] mode of structure”:
namely, the effects that the pure and simple combinatory of the signifier
determines in the reality in which it is produced. For is it not structuralism
that allows us to posit our experience as the field in which it [ça] speaks? If
the answer is yes, structure’s ‘distance from experience’ vanishes, since it
operates there not as a theoretical model, but as an original machine that
directs [met en scène] the subject there.82
The unconscious, we recall, is the “logical implication” of the differential

signifier (as theorised by structuralist linguistics) and it is in the signi-
fying combinations produced by the speaking subject that the uncon-
scious can be heard. Lacan’s “way of topologizing language’s status”83
does not constitute a model; rather than inertly setting the scene as a
given background against which acts are performed (a transcendental,
enveloping sphere), it is instead a “pure” logic, a combinatory “machine”
that actively “directs” the scene. It is “the analysis situs in which I claim to
materialize the subjective process”84 as a dynamic experience, a temporal
cut rather than a static backdrop. The “original machine” is operative
at the origin of the subject; the subject emerges from a combination of
signifiers that fail to produce an “ontotautology,” an effect of the “pure
and simple combinatory of the signifier.” According to Miller, Lacan’s
ideal, which he sought to realise through a topologisation of structur-
alist linguistics, was that of a “knowledge that is not a representation
of reality” but instead “identical to the very principle of the effective
development of reality, identical to the principle of its production, of its
Wirklichkeit.”85 As we have seen, the line of the Möbius strip’s edge and
the line of the cut are equivalent; structure, as the combinatorial of the
signifier, is an action rather than a given.
This topology is “structure defined by signifying articulation”86—

defined, that is, not by a description but by a “pure and simple combina-
tory” (the very same logic of the signifier that makes the effet de signifié
of any description inadequate), a fundamental relationship whereby one
signifier comes to represent the subject for another signifier. Topology is
not a cartographic illustration of structure: it “is not ‘designed to guide
us’ in structure. It is this structure—as retroaction of the chain-like order
in which language consists.”87
2.4 The Torus

Noting that structure is created by the emergence of the signifier and is
subsequently “defined by signifying articulation,” Lacan maintains that
“transcendental aesthetics has to be recast in our times.”88 According to
Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, space and time are a priori intuitions;
they are the innate and universal conditions of possibility for the presen-
tation and reception of objects. Space, as the a priori form of what Kant
refers to as “outer sense,” is what enables the subject to experience an
object as being outside himself and thus distinct from himself. Time, as
the a priori form of “inner sense,” is necessary for the subject’s experience
of objects in time—that is, an appreciation of whether objects exist at the
same time or in different times. Adrian Johnston succinctly provides the
general terms of Lacan’s quarrel with Kant:
[T]he two pure forms of intuition of the first Critique (i.e. inner sense as
time and outer sense as space) are said to be delegitimized as supposedly
eternal and exceptionless—and this insofar as Freud’s momentous discov-
ery of the unconscious deprives the conscious experiences on which Kant’s
‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ is based on their foundational, unsurpassable
standing. Worded differently, Lacan’s argument is that Freudian psycho-
analysis, in challenging the traditional presumption of an equivalence
between the mental and the conscious, raises objections to the ostensible a
priori universality of any depiction of space and time rooted in a concep-
tion of consciousness wedded to this old, pre-Freudian presumption. …
Lacan, in connection with this critique of Kant, suggests that his turns to
63
topology and other mathematical resources of more recent vintage than the
late-eighteenth century are partly motivated by an intention to forge a
non-Kantian transcendental aesthetic doing justice to the unconscious of
analysis, with its primary process thinking as different-in-kind from the
secondary process thinking characteristic of consciousness.89
Kant’s resources, pre-dating Lacan’s resources (i.e. structuralist linguis-

tics and topology), are Newton’s representation of time as a continuous
straight line—following which Kant adheres to a conception of time as
a linear succession of events and a progression from cause to effect—and
Euclidean geometry—the laws and propositions of which are presented
by Kant as an inalienable and a priori knowledge, every bit as certain as
the elementary arithmetic (e.g. 5+2=7) that rescued Descartes from the
void that doubt had got him into. Leaving aside for now the distinction
between the empirical object perceived by the Kantian subject—the sub-
ject equated with conscious thought—and the far stranger object a that
causes and impinges upon unconscious thought (rather than obligingly
presenting itself to be perceived by thought), let us consider again Lacan’s
“way of topologizing language’s status,” his presentation of the space of
the diachronic signifying chain.
We have seen how a paradoxical “space … seems to be part and parcel
of the unconscious structured like a language”90—how, that is, a Möbian
space is revealed and transformed by the temporal unfolding of a signify-
ing chain—and why it is that to be “in [the space of ] the unconscious”
is to be in “the space of a lapsus [laps],”91 the space of a bungled meaning
effect. Lacan exploits the equivocity of the signifier in alluding to space
and time—laps can refer to both a lapsus and a period of time (laps de
temp)—thereby subverting philosophical good form by means of a lapsus,
by means of an instance or result of the very same (topo)logic of the signi-
fier (as laps around a Möbian circuit) that he is establishing. Therefore, it
is no surprise to find Lacan arguing that the differential signifier, despite
being primary and fundamental in the constitution of the divided sub-
ject, bears no relation to the Kantian “Einheit [unity], which is the foun-
dation of every synthesis, of the a priori synthesis … the function of a
norm, to be understood as a universal rule.”92 If it is not immediately
clear which of Kant’s many unities Lacan is referring to this is probably
because he has in mind the entire conglomerate: the original “unity”

of the subject’s “apperception”—as the condition of possibility for the
combining of perceptions rather than a result of this combination—and
the “unity of experiences” (Einheit der Erfahrung) guaranteed by those a
priori intuitions, time and space, which must themselves be considered
unities because they are the condition of possibility of instances/objects
rather than a collection of instances/objects.
The “paradox of [Lacan’s] One,” and what distinguishes it from the
philosopher’s One, “the big 1 which dominates all thinking from Plato
to Kant” (we are reminded here of Lacan’s contention that the intuition
of the sphere dominates our logic), is that, despite being foundational
and primary in the constitution of the subject, it incarnates “difference as
such.”93 The psychoanalytic One, the S1, is neither an enveloping univer-
sal sphere nor a self-sustaining and unique unit; it is always One among
others and, because it is differential, because it must be among others in
a combination, there is always One missing—the One that would allow
the subject to say it (the One as self-sustaining and unique unit) or say
it all (the One as enveloping universal sphere): “The signifier in itself is
nothing but what can be defined as a difference from another signifier.
It is the introduction of difference as such into the field.”94 The structures
created by the introduction of “difference as such” are “organisations of
the hole”95 (Fiat trou)—this hole being the lack (of a signifier) that would
ideally be resolved by an “ontotautology,” the Einheit of signifier and
being, but is instead founded and consolidated by the differential signi-
fier’s double-loop.
Adopting another Kantian term in Seminar XI, Lacan stated that, as
the logical implication of the differential signifier, the “true function”
of “the concept of the unconscious” “is precisely that of being in pro-
found, initial, inaugural, relation with the function of the concept of the
Unbegriff—or Begriff of the original Un, namely, the cut.”96 At stake in
this “original Un” are three different ‘Ones’:
(1) The cut-as-One is not a One in the ordinary sense of the word (one
unit or entity); it is one split or one division (between two) because a
cut requires a combination of signifiers (a man [S] is a man [S′]).
65
(2) As we saw in the previous section, the subject’s lack-of-being (as a

nothing or one nothing) is the effect of this Möbian cut.
(3) Signifying uniquity (the signifier as One and identical to itself ) is lost
once the cut qua “original Un” has been completed. However, this
cut is structurally necessary because a signifier cannot sustain itself; it
always requires another signifier, an anticipation-retroaction combi-
natorial that makes the signifier different to itself. In other words, it
is the cut, not signifying uniquity, that is original. Signifying uniq-
uity is only constituted as lost once the cut has occurred.
The cut that institutes both the lack of the signifier and the lack-of-being
inaugurates the unconscious as a matrix of signifying chains limited by
lack (Urverdrängung): “the limit of the Unbewusste is the Unbegriff—not
the non-concept, but the concept of lack.”97 Reflecting Kant’s distinction
between a priori intuition and secondary concept (Begriff)—simply put,
concepts are derived from experiencing objects in space and time, the
latter intuitions being necessary for the formation of concepts—Lacan
presents lack as a Begriff because it is not a priori. It is created by the sig-
nifier, a Begriff formed by the “original Un.” Whereas in Kant’s transcen-
dental aesthetics a series of a priori unities not only support the subject of
conscious thought but found this subject as a unity, in Lacan’s aesthetic
the foundation of the subject of the unconscious is equivalent to the
foundation of an inviolable hole, the Unbegriff produced by the spatio-
temporal paradoxes of a Möbian cut.
Importantly, if, prior to the introduction of the signifier, “there is no
lack in the real … [and] lack is only graspable,” as a concept, “through
the intermediary of the symbolic,”98 it certainly does not follow that the
inaugural cut spoils an Edenic Einheit, an ideal, a priori state of nature
where no such concept of lack existed: the body, we recall, was always
already fragmented and in a state of maladaptive disarray. In this wrong-
headed story of origins, which suggests that Fiat trou follows Fiat lux, the
imaginary spherical One returns in its most seductive guise:
Is the one anterior to discontinuity? I do not think so, and everything that
I have taught in recent years has tended to exclude this need for a closed
one—a mirage to which is attached the reference of the enveloping psyche,
a sort of double of the organism in which the false unity is thought to

reside … [T]he one that is introduced by the experience of the unconscious
is the one of the split, of the stroke, of rupture …
Where is the background? Is it absent? No. Rupture, split, the stroke of
the opening makes absence emerge—just as the cry does not stand out
against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence
emerge as silence.99
It is on the occasions that the subject’s cries are met with silence that he
encounters not only his own lack (alienation) but also the lack of the
Other in a second logical operation (known as separation).
“Unconscious desire,” the desire to surmount “the limit of the
Unbewusste,” “is found in the repetition of demand” and such a “rep-
etition is a matter of the search, which is at once necessary and con-
demned,”100 for an ideal signifying uniquity that would unify the divided
subject, dissolving Urverdrängung by means of a conscious and univocal
representation of being. If the cut of “difference as such” prompts desire
by producing a lack-of-being, it is this same structural effect that sustains
desire: given that articulated demands are the vehicle for desire (abbre-
viated as D and d respectively in Fig. 2.4), this same desire cannot be
ideally presented; it is found not in a demand but in the “repetition of
demand” as “a metonymic remainder that runs under it.”101 The subject’s
successive demands produce a toric surface that organises (creates and
circles) two holes:
demand desire
Fig. 2.4 Demand and desire on the torus (Lacan first introduced this figure
in SIX, 7/3/62)
67
“[T]he torus is the substance, the hypokeimenon of the structure in

question concerning desire”102 because it is formed by the fundamen-
tal relationship between two holes or circuits: the repetition of a circuit
around the tubular hole (demand) eventually reveals a second hole that
insists at the very heart of structure. These holes/circuits are not the sec-
ondary features of the toric structure; the relationship between them is
this structure.
If the subject of alienation, as what one signifier represents for another
signifier, owes his existence entirely to the Other, the subject of separa-
tion’s existence is defined by some-thing that lies beyond the Other. On
the occasions that his cries are met with silence—when the (m)Other fails
to be an unerring and suffocating presence, making the very articulation
of demand unnecessary—the subject, confronted with this change, must
attempt to decipher an inscrutable variable: the fact of the (m)Other’s
desire; an enigmatic x. If the barred subject’s alienation is predicated
upon a monolithic Other, “[i]n separation,” writes Bruce Fink, “we start
from a barred Other, that is, a parent who is him or herself divided: who
is not always aware (conscious) of what he or she wants (unconscious)
and whose desire is ambiguous, contradictory, and in constant flux.”103
What was once mistakenly experienced as an enveloping sphere, reveals
itself to be inconsistent and structured by a lack.
The Other’s discourse, structured by the logic of the signifier, cannot
achieve the coherence of univocal meaning; each utterance produces an
“interval intersecting the signifiers … [which] is the locus of … meton-
ymy. It is there that … desire crawls, slips, escapes … The desire of the
Other is apprehended by the subject in that which does not work, in the
lacks of the discourse of the Other” and it is this inconsistency that leads
him to ask “‘He is saying this to me, but what does he want?’”104 Rather
than subsisting as two enveloped-enveloping spheres, subject and Other
are two tori that link by means of each other’s lack (Fig. 2.5):
The “circularity of the relation of the subject to the Other” that would
see each complete the other, is foiled by a “twist in the return,”105 a rever-
sal in the relational relay between subject and Other which is itself caused
by a “twist in the return”—the Möbian inverted redoubling of any sig-
nifying articulation—ensuring that desire metonymically exceeds the
meaning effect of any spoken demand. Thanks to a mutual incompetence
(i.e. the inability to communicate desire) that binds both speaker and
Fig. 2.5 The tori of subject and Other (Lacan first introduced this figure in
SIX, 14/3/62)
receiver in a union without unity, interdependence without symbiosis,

the sender’s message is returned in an inverted form:
(1) The subject demands (to know) the Other’s desire: What do you
want?
(2) The Other demands (to know) the subject’s desire: What do you
want?
The value of the inter-linking tori is that they present the dialecti-
cal “relationship of inversion”106 between desire and demand: the circuit
of desire in one torus turns around the circuit of demand in the other
torus. This is the attraction of totalitarianism for the obsessional neu-
rotic, the subject who is forever asking the question about the purpose
of his existence—a question that supposes the existence of a lackless
Other that might answer it with a demand, a sphere that will contain
and define him. The obsessional, deferent to the (m)Otherland, derives
the existential certainty of purpose from this unambiguous demand that
frees him from the paralysing prospect of liberty and the recognition of
the groundlessness of his desire and the Other’s lack. Put simply, the
obsessional desires the Other’s demand. For the hysterical neurotic this
toric inversion between subject and Other is reversed: he demands the
Other’s desire, presenting himself as the enigmatic cause of this desire.
The obsessional’s desire turns around the Other’s demand and the Other’s
desire turns around the hysteric’s demand: in both instances the toric
void is plugged not by not by a substance or essence but a misfiring inter-
subjective communication—the very same desirous communication that
created this void.
69
Despite being linked to the (m)Other, the subject is also separated from
the (m)Other because he is linked to the point at which the (m)Other
is missing or lacking. His attempts to align his own lack-of-being with
the (m)Other’s lack—to, in other words, answer the question of the (m)
Other’s desire by making himself the answer—and produce, from this toric
embrace, a unified One, fail thanks to the intervention of a third term:
the signifier. The subject cannot figure out from the (m)Other’s demands
what it is exactly that is desired of him. The (m)Other’s desire is mediated
and obscured by language; the Other becomes “the site of the lack-of-
signifier”107 with respect to which the alienated lack-of-being becomes a
separated subject whose “desire merely leads us to aim at the gap where
it can be demonstrated that the One is based only on the essence of the
signifier,”108 the differential S1 that, in combination with another signifier,
produces the cut as the “original Un.” This “gap” is the “interval intersect-
ing the signifiers,” the lack in the Other’s discourse, at which the subject
“aims” and through which his toric circuit of desire passes.
***
As noted, according to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics, space is not an
object among others or a collection of objects but is instead the necessary
precondition for the presentation of objects and is itself ordered by uni-
versality and necessity of Euclidean geometry—an a priori “science that
determines the properties of space”109 rather than a knowledge derived a
posteriori from learning and experience. This geometry is founded upon
a series of propositions: a point has zero dimensions; a line without
breadth joining one point to another has one dimension; a plane with
breadth and length defined by lines has two dimensions and a space in
which a plane exists has three dimensions. In Seminar X Lacan informed
his long-suffering audience that “if I made you do so much topology …
it was precisely to suggest that the function of the hole is not univocal”
and then went on to ask “[w]ithin a circle inscribed on a plane, what
is the hole?”110 Such a circle, as a one-dimensional line inscribed on a
two-dimensional plane, would be incapable of creating and delineating
a hole worthy of the name since it would have no depth and, therefore,
no edge. Furthermore, if one were to assess this circle from a topological
perspective—that is, if one were to attempt to discern the invariant that
remains throughout deformation, leaving aside metric considerations
(the geometric perspective)—one would find that it could be continu-

ously shrunk to a zero-dimensional point. Similarly, any circle inscribed
on the surface of a sphere will always be reducible to a point.
Lacan turns to the torus in order to show that “the hole is not univo-
cal,” that there are reducible circles—circles that can be contracted to a
point—and irreducible circles. It is no coincidence that the two irreduc-
ible circles organise the holes that are toured by the circuits of demand
and desire (Fig. 2.6):
The reducible circle inscribed on the toric surface has exactly the same
properties as a circle drawn on a plane or a sphere, which is why Lacan will
again caution against the same error that mistakes the unilateral Möbius
strip for a bilateral surface—the error that infers from a static local per-
spective a global apprehension of structure—by stating that this reduc-
ible circle “has nothing to do, topologically, with the torus.”111 What is
to be identified is the invariant that qualitatively defines structure. The
fact that the torus can support irreducible circles and the sphere cannot is
what proves that the torus and the sphere are not homeomorphic—that,
in other words, one cannot be transformed into the other without there
occurring a radical break. While we might suggest that, when compared
to the Möbian line without points (the insubstantial subject of the signi-
fier), the toric subject of demand and desire represents something of an
reducible circles
irreducible circles
Fig. 2.6 Reducible and irreducible circles on the torus (Lacan first referred to
this distinction in SIX, 14/3/62. For the official figure, see: SX, p. 133)
71
ontological inflation, the torus’s volume is without sphericity; the two

circles that organise this structure surround holes that cannot be closed.
“Even though any old circle drawn on the plane can shrink down
to nothing more than a point … this is not the case on the surface of
the torus … Structures exist that do not entail the hole being filled
in”112—indeed, structure, unlike the imaginary consistency of the one-
dimensional circle, continues to exist because the hole cannot be reduced:
it is from this impossibility of closure, this “real-of-the-structure,” that
the structure derives its ex-sistence: “The torus … is not a puff of air
… it has all the resistance of something real.”113 Just as the price of the
subject’s symbolic being is an irreducible lack (of being), the circle’s exis-
tence, as something more than an abstract object of thought—a one-
dimensional line without width or depth that can only be said to ‘exist’ in
the imaginary as an abstract geometrical idea rather than an actuality—is
logically consonant with an ex-sistence that inhibits its reduction to the
non-existence of a dimensionless point. Like the Möbius strip’s twist that
prevents the incidence of a single tautologous circle, the real of irreduc-
ibility is not beyond structure but inherent and integral to it: “there are
certain of [the subject’s] loops which cannot be reduced. This is the whole
interest of the model of my torus.”114
The interior eight can be inscribed on the surface of the torus as a line
that accomplishes both the circuit of demand (a tour of the tubular hole)
and the circuit of desire (a tour of the ‘central’ hole) (see Fig. 3.5). While
we will reserve an account of the practical significance of this fact for our
examination of the topology of interpretation in Chap. 3, it does make
apparent a pivotal feature of the topological space-time of Lacan’s non-
Kantian transcendental aesthetic: all of these surfaces are either reducible
to this line/cut (as is the case with the Möbius strip) or can support it (as is
the case with the torus and the cross-cap). Neither a plane nor the surface
of a sphere can support a line that misses its origin and only rejoins itself
after a double-loop. Any attempt to inscribe such a line on a sphere will
always produce a circle because intersections on this surface either occur
immaculately or not at all: they are never missed. If transcendental aesthet-
ics must be “recast” because “structure [is] defined by signifying articula-
tion,” if the subject’s aesthetic is determined not by a priori intuitions of
space and time but by the fact that he speaks and is spoken of (with such
speech invariably being “the space” and time “of a lapsus”), the sphere will
have to be cast aside because it implies “a world whose aesthetic is such
that everything can be folded back on everything” in a concentric reduc-
tion toward the “vanishing unity” of the dimensionless point, a “collapse
which when significance is involved will be called tautology.”115 If the sig-
nifying articulation were a single-loop inscribable on a sphere rather than
an inverted redoubling—if, that is, the symbolic was a set of self-identical
signifiers (a=a)—the circle and the hole that it supported would be closed,
being reducible to a point. A single signifier, like the point, cannot exist;
it requires another signifier—the institution of a double-loop from which
there is no turning back. “The little interior eight is well and truly irreduc-
ible”116: the Urverdrängung founded by this redoubling retains an existence
founded on ex-sistence, the impossibility of saying it all.
***
Secondary to its demonstration of the irreducibility of lack, the torus,
like Lacan’s other topological references, allows for the reduction of rheto-
ric. We might compare the presentation of the topological relation between
demand and desire to some of his less concise sentences in which this same
presentation seems to run on without resolution, caught in the metonymy
of desire itself as language attempts to perfectly capture communicative
intention: “desire is the axis, the pivot, the handle, the hammer, by which
is applied the force-element, the inertia, that lies behind what is formulated
at first, in the discourse of the patient, as demand.” It is surely no coin-
cidence that this repetitious imprecision is accompanied by a promise to
“illustrate it for you next time with a small topological drawing.”117
Of course, we should not assume that the matter will be resolved solely
by replacing a verbalised description with a drawing: what’s important
is that this drawing be topological. Lacan provided an instructive dra-
matisation of what’s at stake when, in Seminar VII, he imagined ask-
ing a simpleton to produce a drawing of the subject’s psychical economy
as determined by das Ding. Lacan had spent the two preceding sessions
explaining that das Ding (a term taken from Freud’s Entwurf) is “the
beyond-of-the-signified. It is as a function of this beyond-of-the-signified
and of an emotional relationship to it that the subject keeps its distance
and is constituted in a kind of relationship characterized by primary
73
affect, prior to any repression.”118 It is, in other words, beyond the reach
of any meaning effect. Das Ding is the term given to the Other’s desire/
lack encountered by the subject prior to this desire’s repression (its media-
tion and obscuration) in language. It is experienced as an illegible trauma
against which the subject constitutes itself as a defence. Fink argues that
“trauma functions as the child’s cause: the cause of his or her advent as
subject and of the position the child adopts as subject in relation to the
Other’s desire. The encounter with the Other’s desire constitutes a trau-
matic experience of pleasure/pain or jouissance, which Freud describes
as a sexual über, a sexual overload.”119 It is with respect to this trauma
that “the first seat of subjective orientation takes place … the choice of
neurosis.”120 It is the discernment of how this trauma organises, and is
organised by, the subjective libidinal economy of associative signifiers
and identifications that an analytic reading achieves.
In Seminar XVII Lacan described the “mother’s desire”—the “Other as
a Ding”121 or the “maternal thing”122—in terms of an enormous croco-
dile that would swallow the unsuspecting subject whole were it not for
a “wedge … [which] is called the phallus.”123 A wedge is driven between
the subject and (m)Other which allows the former to be separated from
the latter. A third term intervenes in the oppressive dyad: “one signifier
comes to signify that part of the parents’ desire which goes beyond the
child … that signifier is the phallus.”124 In the operation of what Lacan
calls the paternal metaphor, the (m)Other’s desire is named—or, more
precisely, substituted for a name: the Name-of-the-Father. This latter is
assumed by the subject to have earned the (m)Other’s desire by virtue
of possessing something that the subject does not: the phallus, which
thereby becomes the signifier of (the (m)Other’s) desire. It is the signi-
fier par excellence, the signifier without signified. We cannot say what
the phallus is. The traumatic concentration of desire is diluted when it
becomes what one signifier represents to another signifier. The Other’s
desire, once suffocatingly constant, becomes an inconstant variable x by
being subject to re-presentation.
While the third term installs an irremediable distance between the sub-
ject and the Other, which is necessary for the former’s constitution, it is
nevertheless experienced as a resented prohibition (non-du-père) respon-
sible for a keenly felt lack. The (m)Other, whose desire the subject now
shares, is at times present and at others absent. The subject, if he is to have
his needs tended to, must now listen to speech—to detect the Other’s
desire in the Other’s demands—and communicate his needs by means of
spoken demands. There is, however, “a deviation of man’s needs due to the
fact that he speaks”: firstly, because speech cannot integrally transmit need
without loss and secondly, because the speaking subject is not a purely
biological entity, his lack is not a matter of nourishment: “What is thus
alienated in needs constitutes an Urverdrängung, as it cannot, hypotheti-
cally, be articulated in demand; it nevertheless appears in an offshoot that
presents itself in man as desire.”125 The “prohibition of incest”—that is,
the prohibition of the (re)union of subject and (m)Other as One—“is
nothing other than the sine qua non of speech.”126 There is installed a “dis-
tance between the subject and das Ding,” constituting the desiring, sepa-
rated subject, and this “distance is precisely the condition of speech.”127
“Castration means that jouissance”—the traumatic, incomprehensible
jouissance of the sexual über that causes as much pain as it does pleasure—
“has to be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of
desire.”128 The cut of the signifier—its castrating effect as the introduction
of “difference as such”—results in an irreducible lack: the absolute jouis-
sance that would annul this lack is endlessly deferred; desire cannot be
presented in language except as an evasive “metonymic remainder.” The
introduction of the signifier thus amounts to a “troumatisme”,129 a trau-
matism and a hole (trou): it is both the vehicle of the Other’s desire/lack
that traumatises the uncomprehending subject and the means by which
the subject comes to lack the non-signifying jouissance that threatens to
engulf him. The signifying combinations of unconscious desire—them-
selves arranged and inflected by various master signifiers that derive their
value from their proximity to the encounter with das Ding prior to repres-
sion (prior, that is, to the substitution of das Ding for these particular,
non-sensical signifiers as sub-headings for which there is no synthesising
editorial)—nevertheless operate in accordance with the pleasure principle:
a certain measure of pleasure can be obtained on the “inverse scale” by, in
the movement of inverted redoubling, looping around das Ding. Desire
is sustained provided the distance between the subject and the Thing is
maintained at a Goldilocks equilibrium.
We abut upon a structural paradox concerning reality and the real:
if “das Ding is a primordial function which is located at the level of the
75
initial establishment of the gravitation of unconscious Vorstellungen,”130

if, in other words, das Ding is pivotal to the constitution of the uncon-
scious structured like a language, it is also irreducible to this same lin-
guistic web. Anticipating the topology that would come to dominate his
seminars in the 1970s and grappling with a complex intertwining of logi-
cally heterogeneous elements, Lacan frequently referred to the figure of
the knot. The “unconscious castration complex”—the point at which the
quarrel between jouissance and the signifier is at its most problematic,
influential and, regarding symptom formation, productive—“functions
as a knot.”131 In terms of analytic practice, “the nodal point by which
the pulsation of the unconscious is linked to sexual reality”—the real of
sexual trauma—“must be revealed. This nodal point is called desire.”132
This gravitational “real-of-the-structure” sets a limit to interpretation by
being negatively “revealed” as that which is impossible to rehabilitate:
“individual history … is orientated, pivoting, polarised by this secret and
perhaps in the final analysis, never accessible point … the irreducibility of
a Urverdrängung, the existence of this navel of desire in the dream.”133
It is, to recycle a formulation first offered in our introduction, the ex-sis-
tent “supporting point” that vanishes beneath sense, the knot in the cord:
If something questions us, it comes precisely from analytic experience as

locating somewhere this point at the infinity of everything that is organised
in the order of signifying combinations. This point at infinity being irre-
ducible insofar as it concerns a certain jouissance, that has remained prob-
lematic, and that for us sets up the question of jouissance under an aspect
that is no longer external to the system of knowledge. It is around this signifier
of jouissance, this signifier excluded insofar as it is the one that we promote
under the term of phallic signifier, it is around this that there is organised
all the biographies to which analytic literature tends to reduce what is
involved in neurosis.134
This is, of course, quite some question, and one that we can only call
attention to rather than definitively answering here: how exactly does one
go about locating that which is, by definition, unlocalisable; the “point at
infinity” that ties and guarantees “this constitutive knot”?135 This prob-
lem remains utterly inscrutable so long as one’s attention is solely fixed
on the insubstantial “order of signifying combinations,” the inverted
r edoubling of lines-without-points. The line errantly redoubles itself and

has no localisable point precisely because no signifier can signify itself.
Any search for meaning—a final or original organising principle—is des-
tined to navigate a ‘bad’ infinity of interminable extension because “the
point at the infinity of everything”—the universalising One or “Other of
the Other”—does not exist: “language cannot constitute a closed set; in
other words: there is no Universe of discourse.”136
Lacan’s second sentence goes some way to resolving this impasse: the
navel is “irreducible” not because it is infinitely deferrable, but because
“it concerns a certain jouissance”—a jouissance that is not simply “external
to the system of knowledge [savoir].” This is not, however, to suggest that
jouissance can be either systematised or known in the traditional sense.
Lacan distinguishes between two modes of knowledge: firstly, that of the
conscious ego (connaissance)—a naive epistemology that regards reality to
be a consistent and coherent totality (One) in which discrete and unitary
objects or subjects (other Ones) present themselves (unsurprisingly, “[t]he
whole is the index of connaissance”137)—and secondly, that of the uncon-
scious signifying combinations (savoir): a knowledge that does not know
that it knows. If what is “discover[ed]” in psychoanalysis is “not of connais-
sance or representation” but instead belongs to the “order of savoir,” this
does not mean that these combinations are infinitely random: it is instead
“a question of something that links one signifier, S1, to another signifier,
S2, in a relationship of reason.”138 To cite the subtitle of an important écrit,
this ‘Reason since Freud’ does not constitute a new Enlightenment con-
naissance aimed at self-mastery. The cause of, or reason for, the desirous
chains of unconscious savoir is the traumatic encounter with das Ding
and the contingent fashion in which this real “sexual über” is mitigated by
the “signifier of jouissance”—the phallic signifier—that is itself “excluded”
from the substitutive chains that bloom from the very same logic that this
signifier, qua “difference as such,” institutes (primal repression).
Returning again to an important quotation: if “das Ding is a primordial
function which is located at the level of the initial establishment of the
gravitation of unconscious” signifying combinations, and this same savoir
is accreted in accordance with the pleasure principle (that is, if the chains
both coil around, and recoil from, this “sexual reality” in such a way that
allows desire to be supported and some jouissance to be obtained simply
77
by virtue of desire’s continuance), we can begin to see how this com-

mingling of jouissance and the signifier allows the “nodal point” where
the “unconscious is linked to sexual reality” to be approached in analytic
experience. It is “repetition”—inverted redoubling heavy with the sub-
stance of jouissance—that “is the basis of your experience … the stickiest,
the most annoying, the most symptogenic repetitions.”139 Repetition is:
[T]he savoir that specifies the real [le réel, le cerne], as much as possible as
impossible … Thus the real is distinguished from reality. This, not to say that
it is unknowable, but that there is no question of knowing [connaître] one-
self there, but rather of demonstrating this real. A path exempt from any
idealization.140
The signifying combinations cerne le réel, negatively circumscribing the

subject’s traumatic cause. Vitally, producing such material in analytic
experience is not the first step to “knowing oneself there”—to replace the
unruly Id with the ego—and neither is this material a forlorn testimony
to some quasi-mystical “unknowable” that makes the “point at infinity”
a reified Beyond rather than an ex-sistent actuality. This is particularly
important because it exempts Lacan from the charge of what Badiou
refers to as “idealinguistery”141—idealism taken to extraordinary lengths
by the linguistic turn.
For proponents of “idealinguistery,” reality is nothing more than a
social construction, a web of signifiers organised by power and narrative.
There is nothing outside the text and any attempt to prove otherwise is to
be decried as inelegant essentialism. While the distinction Lacan draws
between reality and the real, along with his characterisation of the latter
as impossible, certainly has all the hallmarks of idealism, his insistence
that the real can be demonstrated sets him apart. For the idealist, the real
can only be represented; he only has access to reality qua representations:
“reality is redoubled [redouble] in that he represents it, so that we no
longer have to do more than reproduce this lining [doublure].”142 Lacan’s
use of the word doublure—suggestive of an insulating lining, a doubling
of enveloped-enveloping spheres—contests the idealist’s pretension to
epistemological modesty. As Joan Copjec writes, for the psychoanalytic
subject the relation between reality and the real is rather less serene:
One of psychoanalysis’s deepest insights is that we are born not into an

already constituted world that impinges on our senses to form perceptions,
but in the wake of a primordial loss; it is not, then, our relation to the order
of things, but our relation to das Ding that decides the objectivity of our
reality or its collapse.143
There is an irreducible structural defect and it is this defect, rather than

any a priori Einheit or a posteriori perceptions and re-presentations, that
determines the subject’s aesthetic.
Before seeing why the reality formed “in the wake of primordial loss,”
as a particular organisation of the hole, is essentially fantasmatic, let us
return to Lacan’s “simple soul”—tasked with representing the place of
das Ding—for whom the reader has probably generated a good deal of
sympathy:
Simply by writing it on the board and putting das Ding at the centre, with
the subjective world of the unconscious organized in a series of signifying
relations around it, you can see the difficulty of topographical representa-
tion. The reason is that das Ding is at the centre only in the sense that it is
excluded. That is to say, in reality das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as
the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget—the Other whose pri-
macy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, some-
thing strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the
level of the unconscious only a representation can represent.144
Das Ding presents us with a structural paradox which we can recognise

from the statements examined in our introduction: that something of
the “subject’s réel” “escapes us” “cannot escape us”; it is both “prehis-
toric”—beyond the grasp and scope of the neurotic’s biography-cum-
reality—and “impossible to forget”; it is both interior and exterior to the
subject, leading Lacan to speak of “the intimate exteriority or ‘extimacy,’
that is the Thing.”145 This spatio-temporal paradox cannot be adequately
presented by a static topography that would either place das Ding inside
a space or outside a space, posing no threat to the space’s boundaries.
Although he does not explicitly mention it here, Lacan had previ-
ously referred to the torus as an embodiment of this paradox. Making
the Hegelian point that death is both inherent to language—the letter
79
kills the spirit or das Ding—and an unconditional limit for the speak-
ing subject, Lacan had proceeded to argue that “[t]o say that this mortal
meaning reveals in speech a centre that is outside of language is more
than a metaphor—it manifests a structure,”146 the fundamental relation-
ship between the subject and his “troumatisme.” Looking at the torus,
this topology’s “peripheral exteriority and central exteriority”—that is,
the hole that the circuit of desire organises—“constitute but one single
region.”147 The hole at its centre stretches out beyond the torus: it is, as we
have seen in this section, both irreducible and extimate.
2.5 The Cross-cap

A word from Leonardo da Vinci: “What is the thing which does not give
itself, and which if it were to give itself would not exist? It is the infi-
nite!”148 Were it not for the fact that the Möbius strip was not discovered
until 1858, we could be forgiven for responding to da Vinci’s question
by referring to the twist. It is not that the infinite does not exist; instead,
the infinite only exists for as long as it does not exist as an apprehensible
object—this refusal to “give itself,” this ex-sistence, being the defining
quality of the infinite. Similarly, the condition of the twist’s ex-sistence is
that we cannot grasp it, we cannot locate the point at which the transition
from recto to verso occurs. Wherever we place our finger on the Möbius
strip, the twist is always elsewhere. Furthermore, neither the infinite nor
the twist reside outside structure; on the contrary, they are absolutely
integral to it. The structure in which the infinite and the twist fulfil pre-
cisely the same function is the ‘real projective plane’—which, for reasons
that will become clear, is quite distinct from the Euclidean plane—and
Lacan argued that this is the structure of the subject’s reality qua fan-
tasy. In unpacking this obscure proposition we will use as our guide Joan
Copjec’s ‘The Strut of Vision: Seeing’s Corporeal Support’—which can
be thought of as a sequel to her ‘The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory
and the Reception of Lacan’149; an essay deservedly renowned for the
necessary corrective that it issued to critics who had mistaken Lacan’s
concept of the gaze for an endorsement of the possibility of ocular mas-
tery—and attempt to make Lacan’s topological references more explicit.
Following Alberti’s ‘legitimate construction’ proffered in On Painting

(1434), a coherent geometry of (single point) perspective was guaranteed
by a fundamental principle: all non-horizontal lines converge toward a
‘vanishing point’ that is obtained by isolating the point on the horizon line
that aligns with the viewer’s eye. The vanishing point was supplemented
by a ‘distance point’ that allowed the artist to organise horizontal lines.
In Seminar XI Lacan exploited this splitting of the subjective determina-
tion of the visible, noting that it not only gave the lie to the idea that
Renaissance perspective is necessarily supported by (and, in turn, sup-
portive of ) a Cartesian unity that binds seeing (thinking) to being but
that when this splitting is exaggerated, when the two subjective points fail
to correspond in accordance with artistic/geometric convention, the effect
produced is that of anamorphosis. As is well known, Lacan illustrated his
point by referring to Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Immanent to, and
yet detached from, the painting’s meticulous testimony to the vanitas and
assorted accoutrements of man’s epistemological mastery of the observable
world, sits a distorted blemish, the full import of which only becomes
apparent when the viewer is positioned at a particular distance from the
painting. Jolted, the viewer recognises that there is something his intuitive
apprehension has missed and that his conception du monde is incomplete.
The painting demonstrates to the subject the fallacy of an ideal and global
perspective outside of representation that might allow one to see every-
thing; he is “literally called into the picture”150 as the unwitting object of
a gaze. The distinction between the observer and observed is undermined
and the spatio-temporal non-incidence between the two subjects or points
cannot be sutured, we cannot be in two places at the same time; either we
see the ambassadors and the skull is distorted or we see the skull and the
ambassadors are distorted. What distinguishes this gaze from the hawk-
ish, Foucauldian panopticon, and thereby makes it more disconcerting
than the everyday fact of surveillance, is that the skull’s hollow sockets
do not see us. It is a blind gaze emanating not from an all-knowing, all-
seeing Other—that would, through recognition, confirm our imaginary
existence, our visibility—but from a barred, lacking Other.
Lacan’s discovery of Girard Desargues in Seminar XIII gave him a cred-
ible mathematical support for his insistence that, rather than occupying
a transcendental position with regards to representation, the viewing
81
subject is instead implicated in the construction of the visible and that

this subjective implication necessarily precludes the possibility of an egoic
mastery supposedly afforded to an external viewer who apprehends the
picture plane as an object. Implication—derived from the Latin implicāre,
meaning to be folded within—implies a topology, a particular relation
between interiority and exteriority that Lacan made explicit in Seminar
XIII: “what gives its consistency to a signifying world with a visual struc-
ture, is an envelope structure and not at all one of indefinite extension.”151
The subject is enveloped by a topology, but this is not the envelopment
of one sphere by another; the subject’s implication is due to a structural
split between the vanishing and distance points (the barring of the sub-
ject’s sphere) that can reveal an anamorphotic stain on the picture plane
(the barring of the Other’s sphere). In a short treatise published in 1636,
Desargues had introduced a significant innovation—a clue to the nature
of which can be found in his cumbersome title: Example of one of S.G.D.L’s
general methods concerning drawing in perspective without using any third
point, a distance point or any other kind, which lies outside the picture field.
In the one example contained in this work, Desargues deployed a system
of scales to show how the ‘picture field’ (or plane) is structured by lines
and points internal to this field. Previously, in order to produce a coher-
ent representation, the perspectivist artist had to assemble the lines on the
picture plane by referring to points beyond this plane (such as a distance
point) and often had to draw lines that extended beyond the plane.
Lacan’s claim that the space constructed by projective geometry is not
characterised by “indefinite extension” alerts us to another of Desargues’s
important contributions—the point at infinity. Emerging from a pro-
ductive combination of artistic concerns and mathematical proofs in the
sixteenth century, projective geometry represented a fundamental break
with the Aristotelian worldview, according to which the infinite belongs to
the boundless realm of God, exterior to man’s bounded sphere. However,
as Copjec notes, while it has become routine to observe that Renaissance
painting was responsible for discovering a place for infinity within the
visible world (in the form of the vanishing point) this achievement is
misunderstood when the distinction between the “potential infinity”
presented by “natural perspective” and the “actual infinity” required by
“artificial perspective” is elided.152
As a metrical geometry primed toward identifying the length, width,

height, et cetera, of discrete and finite figures, Euclidean geometry dis-
avowed the infinite because it is immeasurable and indefinable. If the
formalisation of the vanishing point somewhat moderated the Greeks’
outright ban on infinity—if, that is, the infinite was no longer a straight-
forwardly separate domain to the finite, if it was instead a distant bound-
ary, “that point on a never reached horizon which marked the limit
between the finite, sublunary world and an eternal, heavenly space”—it
remained the case that the infinity placed at this vanishing point “was not
something actual, but a measure of our ever-deferred encounter with a
limit.”153 The asymptotic approach to potential infinity (Lacan’s “indefi-
nite extension”) remains grounded in the finite; there is a presumption
that if one were to cover enough distance, to accumulate enough units
(metres, yards, etc.), one would eventually reach the infinite qua van-
ishing point through the finite—an enterprise every bit as absurd as the
notion that one might be able to count to infinity, to reach this infinity
by adding ones. To return to da Vinci’s formulation, while the vanishing
point does not give itself, it has no ex-sistence; it is only virtual.
Copjec aligns this potential infinity that does not definitively break
with Euclidean geometry and Aristotle’s vision of the world with an
epistemological attitude that, despite often being attributed to the
Renaissance artist-cum-mathematician, is at odds with projective geom-
etry. If the geometry of perspective introduced “symbolic forms that
turned the world into a representation”—if, by adding a negative infinity
(the vanishing point) to metric geometry, it became possible to attain a
level of verisimilitude that trumped a Medieval world inhabited by kings
half the size of castles (imaginary forms that created a world of icons and
symbols)—thereby seeming to open the way for a rational cognisance of
the world through “[t]he finite operations of measuring and surveying,”
these same operations only “expose their own futility” because they “can-
not be brought to an end and … thus inscribe a negative sort of infinity
… Rather than manifesting the grandeur of thought,” this epistemology
demonstrates only “the deficiency of thought: an incapacity to conclude
an operation defined by a limit that is structurally unreachable.”154 Such
operations tend toward the imaginary-of-the-symbolic, a totalisation of
83
symbolic forms (the structural combinatorial of lines and points) that

masks the integral structural fault, the real-of-the-symbolic. We might
think here of Lacan’s withering assessment of the attempts made by the
Police in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ to discover the titu-
lar object by dividing the Minister’s apartment into smaller and smaller
segments or our discussion (in 1.3) of the futility of the search for final
and complete meaning. Indeed, we should also recall the terms in which
Lacan spoke of this ideal tautological closure: the signifying articula-
tion as a circle inscribed on a Euclidean plane would be reducible to “a
vanishing limit point,”155 a “vanishing unity”—the supposed unification
of the “universe of discourse” that occurs when one has said it all.
In the Euclidean plane two lines usually intersect at a single point while
parallel lines are defined as lines that do not intersect. Certainly, paral-
lel lines might appear to intersect at the vanishing point, and this is the
impression one would get when standing in the middle of a long and
straight strip of railway tracks, but this is, for the Euclidean geometer, an
illusion. In a work on the geometry of conic sections published in 1639,
Desargues redefined parallel lines as lines that intersect at a point at infin-
ity. Desargues’s proposition and proof opened up a projective space in
which, contrary to the metric concerns of Euclidean geometry, what is
determinate are the invariants in configurations of lines and points that
remain throughout projective transformation. For example, parallels are
not preserved in projective space and various properties of figures such
as lengths and angles—which an artistic practice based on Euclidean
geometry would remain faithful to—become distorted through projective
transformation. As Copjec puts it, projective geometry “sought to preserve
the consistency of the object, not visual similarities.”156 The end result is a
fascinating co-implication of structure and the individual, a mathematisa-
tion of the subjective determination of space, a formal basis for the pre-
sentation of objects as they appear to us that requires a conceptual divorce
from Kant’s insistence that (Euclidean) space is an a priori intuition.
Projective geometry’s proof of the existence—or, better, ex-sistence—
of an “actual infinity” that, despite not being visible, organises the visual
field (qua projective space) as the “real-of-the-structure,” means that its
proponents adopt a different epistemological attitude to that of the
Euclidean geometer:
Projective geometry was invented to seek out what eluded representation,

what no longer had any place in the quantified, represented world. This
does not mean that it sought to represent what was plainly unrepresentable,
but that it sought to demonstrate through its procedures the existence of it….
Unlike the earlier geometry, [projective geometry] never conceived itself as
a method for mapping the visible world, that which was possible to see;
instead it was a method for demonstrating the existence of what it was not
possible to see, that which vision must renounce in order to see.157
Where a Euclidean drawing forecloses distortion, retaining metric prop-

erties that do not survive projective transformation, a painting guided
by projective geometry represents the distortion by referring itself to the
unrepresentable source of distortion, the point at infinity around which
the projective space is assembled, the condition of possibility of the vis-
ible (qua distorted projective space) that remains impossible to see. We
arrive at the paradox of a structure that is closed—recall that Lacan refers
to it as an “envelope structure”—that not only has a place for the infinite
but also owes its very structure as an envelope that implicates the subject
to this infinity.
Between Desargues’s construction of the plane of projection in the
seventeenth century and the discovery of the topological ‘real projective
plane’ in the late nineteenth century there was a considerable amount of
mathematical labour and debate to which it is not possible or even desir-
able to do justice to here. In order to avoid getting too bogged down in
forbidding diagrams and jargon that would take at least twenty pages to
explicate158 we will restrict ourselves to a relatively impressionistic reading
that remains attached at all times to the paradox of the closure of a struc-
ture that occurs not in spite of, but because of, a quality of this structure
that does not “give itself.” In his own haphazard way that is extremely
difficult to follow, Lacan spent several sessions of Seminar XIII demon-
strating how the abstract constructions of projective geometry presume
not a unidirectional eye but a multidirectional eye because they pose a
plane both in front of and behind the painter/viewer. This was accompa-
nied by a discussion of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in which he again
emphasised the envelope structure that folds the viewer into its space.
What is remarkable about this composition—in which Velázquez has
85
painted himself painting on a canvas that shows only its reverse side to
the viewer—is that its dizzying effect is produced not by a simple reversal,
whereby the viewer becomes the viewed by occupying the position of
the painted painter’s model, but by an undecidable split because it is the
very same sight of this painted painter that forces us to recognise that we
are, of course, standing in his position as the viewer par excellence. There
is “loop” that functions “in conformity with the structure of the Möbius
strip,”159 both enveloping and splitting the subject. The extremities of the
planes in front of and behind the painter/viewer have been sewn together
but this is not the closure of a finite sphere that secures the opposition
between inside and outside. Instead, the planes have been sewn together
in the same fashion that one joins the ends of a piece of paper to produce
a Möbius strip. In other words, each point along the top edge of one
plane has been identified with and joined to the antipodal point on the
top edge of the other plane. Now, the reader might understandably feel
that this presentation has become suspiciously analogical and rather awk-
ward. While a consultation of the text cited in the last endnote will make
it apparent that this strange envelope structure does have a precise and
legitimate mathematical basis—although we still have yet to account for
the non-trivial relevance of all of this for Lacanian psychoanalysis—there
is only so much that can be done to mitigate the difficulty of thinking
about it—of visualising it, of forcing it to “give itself.” Certainly, we have
no ready-made receptivity, no unproblematic a priori intuition of this
structure “formed in the wake of primordial loss.”
Let us attempt to acquire a more immersive perspective on this struc-
ture that resists immersion in our conscious space. Imagine that you are
standing on a Euclidean plane, between two parallel lines that stretch
out before you. You have the impression that these lines converge and
meet each other at a single point on the horizon. However, you dismiss
this as an illusion because you know that in Euclidean geometry parallel
lines are defined as lines that do not meet and so you march on into a
tedious eternity of indefinite extension. Now imagine that you are stand-
ing on the surface of a Möbius strip so enormous that the same optical
effect is produced—only this time the lines that appear to converge are
(what we locally perceive to be) the ‘edges’ of the strip. Having completed
the necessary two circuits around the hole, you come to an interesting
conclusion: in order to get to the ‘reverse’ side of your point of depar-

ture you must have somewhere passed through that vanishing point on the
horizon. Furthermore, in passing through this point at which the lines
qua edges appear to meet you have passed through a twist. However, if,
as an explorer-cum-surveyor, you were asked to locate this twist (i.e. the
point at which front and reverse flip), to present this structural quality by
means of a metric geometry, you would fail. The twist/vanishing point
has happened, its effects on your passage are clear to see, and yet it will
not give itself. The twist places infinity both within the finitude of the
double-loop but also without because the twist remains irreducible to the
terms of measurable finitude.
In a projective plane the totality of all the points at infinity comprise
the line at infinity (the horizon line). For the multidirectional eye, this
line is a circle. On a Möbius strip you cannot simply go off in any direc-
tion you fancy; you are constrained by the single edge. The Möbius strip
is not a closed structure; it is the equivalent of a projective plane with a
hole in it. Now imagine that you are standing on a closed Möbian surface
on which you can go not just forwards and backwards but also left and
right, picking which ever point on the line at infinity that appeals. The
problem is that visualising the continuity of such a surface is impossible:
we have to accept that somewhere the surface is going to intersect with
itself just as the lines/edges of the Möbius strip intersect in our (mis)
representation of the Möbian twist/point at infinity. This point of inter-
section of the surface with itself will be the twist. The necessity of this
self-intersection can be felt by taking a rectangular strip of paper so wide
that it is almost a square and attempting to make a Möbius strip of it.
However, this is not the most appropriate demonstration because topol-
ogy is a rubber geometry; we have introduced a metric consideration
(i.e. a wide rectangle) that the topologist disregards; he can continuously
deform the rectangle until it becomes possible to form a Möbius strip
without the surface passing through itself. Alternatively, one could visu-
alise cutting a circular portion out of a sphere and joining the edges of
the resulting hole antipodal point to antipodal point. With this visualisa-
tion it becomes obvious that, strictly speaking, the topology at stake is
a sphere equipped with a cross-cap, although Lacan tended to refer to it
simply as the cross-cap.
87
If the projective plane is a Möbius strip without a hole, then it is also

true to say that the projective plane is a Möbius strip that has had the
edge of its hole sewn to a circular disc. This way of thinking about it
introduces us to a vital distinction—articulated by Juan-David Nasio—
between the theoretical cross-cap and the concrete or visible cross-cap.160
Theoretically we should not have a problem—a Möbius strip has only
one edge, a circular disc has only one edge—but we cannot visualise or
manually demonstrate the smooth functioning of such an operation. We
will only get so far with our sewing before we reach an impasse, a point
at which we must make the circular disc intersect with and pass through
itself. Equally, if we were to suture a hole in a sphere by joining the antip-
odal points of this hole’s edge, we would have to make the surface inter-
sect with itself—an occurrence that is represented on the visual cross-cap
by the self-intersecting line. The drawing of this line is necessitated by
the impossibility of visualising a topology—or immersing a topology in
three-dimensional space—that is neither bilateral and edgeless (like the
sphere and the torus) nor unilateral and edged (like the Möbius strip)
but unilateral and edgeless. It is a closed surface that has only one side.
As Nasio explains:
In order to understand the theoretical property of a cross-cap having nei-

ther an inside nor an outside, let us take the example of an ant following
the surface that never encounters the so-called self-intersecting line. If the
ant begins at a point on the outer anterior side of the right lobe of the
cross-cap to go towards the place of the line, it will be surprised to arrive at
the inner posterior side of the left lobe without having crossed any limit or
border. That is to say, it passed from a supposed outside to a supposed
inside without encountering any obstacle. The obstacle that it could have
encountered, if we were to think of the cross-cap in only three-dimensional
terms, would have been, for instance, another ant taking a symmetrical
path, beginning from the outer anterior side of the left lobe and ending on
the inner posterior side of the right lobe. In short, to recognize the theoreti-
cal property that renders the cross-cap without inside or outside, we must
apply the following rule: two ants passing symmetrically at the same time
and at the same place do not meet, for one is unable to get in the way of
the other.161
In the theoretical cross-cap the self-intersecting line does not exist;

its inscription is the equivalent of artificially localising and fixing the
Möbian twist, offering the surety of a topographical milestone indicat-
ing where one would be forced to punch through to the other side
rather than pass seamlessly. While the visual cross-cap actualises the line
at infinity, in the process of actualisation the infinite has been forced
to “give itself ” and, in doing so, has been lost through misrepresenta-
tion. The distinction between inside and outside does not hold; there is
only one continuous side and the twist remains a “nullibiquitous” and
“ungraspable line”162 rather than a barrier that, in the visible cross-cap,
serves only to underline the distinction by blocking the ant’s progress.
Lacan was very aware of the distinction between the theoretical and
the visible, even exploiting the tension between the two in a fashion
that would alarm a mathematician. As he acknowledges in ‘L’étourdit’,
“my topological presentation” is “doable by a pure literal algebra”163
and it is in this form that topology is presented in advanced textbooks
on the subject. Presented with an algebraic cross-cap, the mathema-
tician will not see a self-intersecting line; he will only read an edge-
less and unilateral surface. Although during the later 1960s and early
1970s Lacan was certainly very taken with the idea that psychoanalysis
could potentially realise the “ideal of science”—that its theory and con-
cepts could be reduced to a taciturn algebra that would be “integrally
transmitted” through a reading that evades the ambiguities of speech
and images—rather than merely aping a particular science164—Lacan’s
mathematisation of psychoanalysis is here contrasted with Freud’s biol-
ogisation—there remained something pedagogically productive in the
inherent failure of an image to transmit the cross-cap, as if this missed
encounter with the “real-of-the-structure” served to alert his audience
to the extent to which “the intuition of the sphere dominates our logic
in a very intimate way” and the manner in which structure, by being
imagined, hides itself.
According to Nasio there are three ways of treating the relation
between interiority and exteriority posed by the cross-cap: the visible, the
theoretical and the psychoanalytical:
89
(1) Through a visual localisation that effectively erases the twist, the
cross-cap becomes a pinched sphere that maintains the opposition
between inside and outside.
(2) There is no border between inside and outside, the two are continu-
ous with each other and therefore become effectively meaningless.
(3) “[T]he ‘psychoanalytic’ manner, while considering the border as
nonexistent, nonetheless maintains the use of the two terms inside
and outside but completely reverses their ordinary meaning …
Concretely, it is much more useful to subvert the relation between an
inside and an outside than simply affirming their nonexistence.”165
If a psychoanalytic practice that functions in conformity with the second

stance risks becoming a trite parody of Derrida’s greatest hits while the first
stance would displace psychoanalysis into ego psychology and the philoso-
phy of consciousness, we can appreciate why Lacan might wish to straddle
two positions that, despite being mutually exclusive, are nonetheless the
consequence of the cross-cap, the contradiction between its abstraction and
immersion. This is an excellent example of what Nasio—following Lacan’s
reference to his renovation of Saussurean linguistics as a “linguisterie”166—
calls Lacan’s “topologerie”167; his subversion of mathematical convention
for the sake of psychoanalysis. As has been argued above, the topologerie
complements the linguisterie—recall here the shift from Saussure’s bilateral
sheet of paper (sign) to Lacan’s Möbius strip (S/s)—rather than opposing
it in a fashion that would allow us to suggest that there is a ‘mathemati-
cal Lacan’ and a ‘poetic Lacan,’ a Lacan who is interested in language and
a Lacan who is not. To formalise the linguisterie (the malfunctioning of
meaning effects) is not to get it to shut up but to account for the funda-
mental spatio-temporal relationships that make the noise.
But what, for the psychoanalyst, is the benefit of subverting the rela-
tion between inside and outside rather than affirming their nonexistence,
of insisting that there is no border between the two but also arguing that
they retain a (transformed) relevance? We return here to the structure
of “extimacy,” a topology in which “das Ding is at the centre only in the
sense that it is excluded,” a topology of desirous signifying chains oriented
by an absent cause that resides outside these chains as “the impossible to
say.” For Lacan, it is not simply a matter of reversing interior and exterior
but, more pertinently, of asserting that what is most interior is most exte-
rior and vice versa.
In illustrating this point, we might suggest that the cross-cap is a topol-
ogisation of the Freudian polarity that organises the psychic economy in
terms of pleasure and pain.168 Lacan again undermined the stability of a
polarity by condensing pleasure and pain into a single term—stating that
jouissance is “this fathomless thing capable of covering the whole s pectrum
of pain and pleasure in a word”169—but, in doing so, also argued that what
promised a maximal pleasure for the subject (i.e. a (re)union with the
Other) would result in maximal pain (i.e. a traumatic encounter with the
Other’s lack). This polarity is re-situated by Lacan on a Möbian contin-
uum that sees progress along one ‘side’ ultimately result in a reversal. Here,
we can better understand Lacan’s observation (discussed in the previous
section) that jouissance occupies “this point at the infinity of everything that
is organised in the order of signifying combinations.” The pleasure prin-
ciple, which operates on the basis of the distance put between the subject
and das Ding by the signifier, “lead[s] the subject from signifier to signi-
fier, by generating as many signifiers as are required to maintain at as low
a level as possible the tension that regulates the whole functioning of the
psychic apparatus.”170 It effectively re-positions the topology of signifying
combinations onto a Euclidean plane and supposes a potential point at
infinity, a maximal jouissance that resides beyond the finitude of the signi-
fying combinations’ “indefinite extension.” The task of psychoanalysis is
not to mimic this exercise in tension management; it must instead entail
the discernment and manipulation of the subject’s particular mode of jou-
issance—a jouissance that is an actual infinite, a jouissance that belongs to
structure without straightforwardly giving itself. By occupying the point
at infinity, the twist that flips the surface, jouissance merges pleasure and
pain—a topology distinct from the ideal maintenance of tension on a
Euclidean plane. Of course, by the time Lacan had linked jouissance to
the point at infinity in Seminar XVI, he had already begun to differenti-
ate between varieties of jouissance, between the absolute jouissance beyond
castration and the partial jouissance knotted to that instrument of castra-
tion, the signifier, and which is betrayed by the subject’s symptomatic
speech. The question of the place of jouissance had become very complex
and would not be resolved until he situated three modes of jouissance in
the Borromean knot (see Chap. 4).
91
***
In ‘L’étourdit’ Lacan repeatedly refers to the cross-cap and the “asphere”;
indicating not just that it is a negation of the sphere but also that it situ-
ates the object a as the topology of fantasy—itself “doable” in a Lacanian
“algebra” (S-barred<>a). Given the numerous revisions that Lacan made
to his concept of the object a, it will not be possible to provide a defini-
tive exposition of this concept and its history here. We will, therefore,
restrict ourselves to examining those qualities of the object and those
fundamental relationships between it and the subject that are presented
by the cross-cap.
If the object is inaccessible to desire, this inaccessibility does not inspire
in desire a certain defeatism; on the contrary, it is by being eternally
unreachable as a peculiarly positive absence that the object causes desire
which, in accordance with the pleasure principle, moves from signifier
to signifier. The object is itself constituted, as that which is missing, by
the “original Un,” the cut of the signifier; it “falls” from the “early” rela-
tion between the subject and Other and “[t]he variety of forms taken by
the object that falls has a certain relationship to the mode in which the
Other’s desire is apprehended by the subject.”171 The objet petit a that is
lacking from the topology created by the signifier should not be confused
with the petit autre that constitutes the imaginary sphere. On the imagi-
nary axis of his L schema, Lacan situates “a, [the infant’s] objects” (or the
images of the petit autre) in relation to “a′, his ego, that is, his form as
reflected in his objects.”172 If, as Fink writes, “‘[i]maginary relations’ …
[are] relations between egos, wherein everything is played out in terms
of but one opposition: same or different,”173 the relation between the
subject and the object a is a symbolic relation or, to be more precise, a
relation between the subject and that which is missing from the symbolic
relation between the subject and the Other. In highlighting the disparity
between the object a and the imaginary a, Lacan argued that the object is
non-specular—which is to say that it is both antinomic to the spherical
worldview of the ego and foreign to the logic of sameness and difference
that commands the imaginary relation between this ego and its specular
other. Noting the fact that the constitution of a mirror image (or double)
always entails a left-right inversion, Lacan stated that the image (as an
image of bodily unity) is, for the ego, the same but different and it is
as such that it becomes the focus of both narcissistic identification and

rivalry. Recall that in order to construct a cross-cap we had to sew a cir-
cular disc to the edge of a Möbius strip (the topology of S-barred)—this
disc is the object a. Unlike a Möbius strip, which has the direction of its
twist inverted by its mirror image, a circular disc is identical to its image
and we can therefore say that it has no image, no specular double, no
imaginary or symbolic abstraction that rescues it from ex-sistence. This is
why Lacan will argue that the skull in The Ambassadors is not “the gaze as
such”—which is the scopic object a—but should instead be thought of
as a “phallic symbol,” an “imaged embodiment of the minus-phi (-φ) of
castration.”174 Certainly, it is a striking testament to man’s mortality—his
ontological and epistemological limitations—that surprises the ostensi-
bly all-seeing viewer, but it is nonetheless legible.
Lacan provides a non-specular interpretation of Las Meninas, persua-
sively arguing why the painting’s disquieting effect on the viewer (that is
caused by the placement of the reversed canvas and the painter within
the painting) cannot be resolved by recourse to a mirror image. If we are
to accept the interpretation according to which Velázquez has painted
himself painting the royal couple who can be seen reflected in the mir-
ror at the back of the room, we must also accept that the Spanish mas-
ter has committed a gross error—an occurrence Lacan deems unlikely.
For the scaling to be correct, the reflection should be half as small as it
is and besides, the reversed canvas is far too large for such portraiture.
Another interpretation has it that Velázquez has produced an elaborate
self-portrait by painting what he saw in a large mirror placed where the
royal couple would have sat in the first interpretation. As Lacan astutely
notes, we have no evidence that Velázquez was left-handed, which he
would need to be if what he reproduced was a mirror image. We are left
only with the irreducible enigma of the Other’s desire—“what we desire
and desire to know is very properly something which is something of the
order of what one can call the desire of the Other, since we say: What
was [Velázquez] trying to do?”175—and the painter’s gaze situated at the
place where, in the same instant, he both sees us and renders us blind.
Summarising the folly of any artistic or literary interpretation that has
as its aim the divination of authorial desire, Lacan places the following
statement into the mouth of the artist: “‘You do not see me from where
I am looking at you.’”176
93
S-barred<>a is neither an imaginary relation between egos and nor is it

an uncomplicated symbolic relation between the subject and the Other. It is
instead a relation between the subject and an object that falls from the rela-
tion between the subject and the Other: “we want to account for the pos-
sibility of a relationship … to the real—I am not saying to the world—which
is such that when it is established, there is manifested in it the structure of
fantasy.”177 It was in presenting such a relation that the cross-cap offered
an elegant, if unimaginable, solution to a particularly tricky casse-tête: how
do two absolutely heterogeneous components—that is, S-barred, which is
nothing but a relation (as what one signifier represents for another signi-
fier), and object a, “which is an absolute” and therefore distinct from “[e]
very object … [which all] abide by a relation”178—combine to generate the
structure of fantasy? Reflecting this heterogeneity, Lacan referred to the uni-
lateral Möbius strip reducible to its edge as the line-without-points and the
bilateral disc as the “out-of-line point.”179 There is a fundamental structural
alterity between these components that is not comparable to the appearance
of similarity or difference in the specular relation between a and a′. Here,
we need to pause and take stock because there is a lot going on with this
“out-of-line point.”
In his representation of the visible cross-cap in Seminar IX Lacan regu-
larly wrote “Φ”—the matheme for the symbolic phallus, the signifier of
the Other’s desire, the signifier for which there is no signified, etc.—at
the lowest point of the self-intersecting line. In Fig. 2.7 this is point BD
and, along with point AC, it is structurally integral to the genesis of
self-intersection. What does this mean? The line is a visualisation of the
twist in the Möbian structure of the signifying chain that ensures the
incompletion of every meaning effect. On the ‘other’ side there is only
another signifier (S′) rather than a signified (s) and the subject is unable
to unequivocally articulate his desire (which is the desire of the Other). In
later seminars Lacan began to refer more broadly to the phallic function
(Φx) as related to the bar between signifier and signified180 and to phallic
signification as the subject’s metonymic meanderings that are congruent
with the maintenance of the bar. It is as if Φ, which, in the paternal meta-
phor, was substituted in for the (m)Other’s desire, is the generating point
(at infinity) of a structural virus (Φx) that runs up the self-intersecting
line (at infinity), transforming the sphere into an asphere.
AC self-intersecting
line
A C
D
BD
B
Fig. 2.7 The cross-cap (For Lacan’s use of Hilbert’s figures, see: SX, p. 98. A
presentation of the interior eight’s line on the cross-cap can be found in SX,
p. 134. This is the presentation that Lacan most frequently relied on)
Möbius strip (S)

self-intersecting
disc (a)
Fig. 2.8 The Möbius strip and the disc
In Fig. 2.8 we can see that the disc/object a is marked by both the
self-intersecting line (Φx) and the point (Φ) whereas the Möbius strip/S--
barred is structured only by the self-intersecting line (twist). This has
important implications for interpretation—which consists of a double-
looped cut that separates the cross-cap into its two constituent parts—
but we’ll get to that in the next chapter.
The object absents itself from any signifying chain; it “is always between
each of the signifiers and the one that follows”—a structural fact that leaves
95
the subject, as that which is divided between signifiers, represented by a

signifier (S) for another signifier (S′), “gaping”181 and attached to an object
that never gives itself. The object is negatively linked to phallic significa-
tion—it is what falls from the cut of the signifier in the “early” relation
between subject and Other—and, therefore, despite not being a signifier
itself, the object a qua disc “is marked by the characteristic of the phallic
function”; it “carr[ies] with it the residue of the self-intersecting line”182 and
this line’s germinal point. However, we only have to make the disc intersect
with itself when constructing the visible cross-cap; in the theoretical cross-
cap this self-intersection does not exist—so again, in his topologerie, Lacan
made use of an ambiguity considered irrelevant by mathematicians in order
to illuminate a psychoanalytic concept (i.e. that the object is related to the
signifier as the missing result of its cut without existing in a relation with a
signifier as the assimilated part of a chain). Of course, in the other portion
of the cross-cap (i.e. the Möbius strip/S-barred) the twist made visible by
self-intersection remains but the phallic signifier itself is excluded from the
Möbian structure of language; it is a “signifier-in-isolation,” cut off from
the signifying chains to which it gave rise.
As Lacan’s expression, “out-of-line point,” suggests, the disc is
reducible to a point. However, this is not the same as reducing a one-
dimensional circle imprinted on a Euclidean plane to a point. The lat-
ter would be zero-dimensional; it would effectively vanish. The former,
when sewn to a Möbius strip, does not. We can expand the Möbian edge
until it closes around an unimaginably small point but it is impossible to
eliminate the point through continuous deformation. As “punctiform”
as a vanishing point and yet as “irreducible” as the two toric circles, it is
a “hole-point”183 that, like the object a, has an unusual double valence,
a substantive nonattendance not adequately presented by other topolo-
gies: “We know the functions and the nature of this privileged point: it
is the phallus; the phallus insofar as it is through it as operator that an
object a can be put at the same place where in another structure (the
torus) we can only grasp its contour.”184
The eccentric out-of-line point adds a structural check, an irreducible
limit to the endless post-structuralist slippage of the lines without points.
It thus installs “a relationship to the real” beyond the relation between
signifiers from which the subject fleetingly emerges, a topological rela-
tion to an extimate object that, despite being at the very centre of the
subject as the cause of his desire, “aris[es] at the point of the failure of
the Other.”185 This envelope structure generated in the wake of the for-
mative, if not informative, relation between the subject and the Other
presents a more radical dissolution of the egoic binary between interiority
and exteriority than two inter-linking tori. However, at the same time that
the asphere subverts the sphere it also introduces a new consistency that
is supported by the ex-sistence of the object—a paradox evinced by this
peculiar formulation: “There is the subject of fantasy, that is: a division of
the subject caused by an object, that is: stopped up by it.”186 The object is
ungraspable; its absence leaves the subject “gaping” but it is in refusing to
give itself that the object not only continues to cause the subject’s desire
but also defers a traumatic encounter with the nothingness—the Other’s
lack—that it veils. The fantasy, as a consistency guaranteed by ex-sistence,
an organisation of a hole by means of an “organising object”187 that is itself
reducible to a “hole-point,” is the “true imaginary”—a set of fundamental
relations that bear no relation to the “false imaginary”188 of the ego.
***
In the next chapter, we will further explore the reasons for Lacan’s
confidence in the inherent utility of topology for psychoanalytic practice
by examining the part topology played in the return to Freud and how
it compares in value with some of the more well-known elements of the
Lacanian bricolage such as linguistics, logic and myth.
2.6 Notes
1. SXXIII, p. 26. Italics original.
2. SIX, 7/3/62.
3. SIX, 9/5/62.
4. Jacques Lacan, ‘Conferences in North American Universities: December
2, 1975 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’, unofficial, trans.
Jack W. Stone, pp. 1–2. Scilicet, p. 54.
6. Lacan, ‘Massachusetts’, p. 2. Scilicet, p. 54.
7. SIX, 7/3/62.
8. SXXIII, p. 52.
9. Ibid.
97
10. Jacques Lacan, ‘Yale University: Lecture on the Body’, trans. Adrian Price
and Russell Grigg, in Culture/Clinic 1, eds. Jacques-Alain Miller and Maire
Jaanus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), pp. 5–6.
11. We should probably not take this as a developed comment on slavery—
history offers no shortage of examples of enslaved bodies being abused
and maimed—but as a flippantly deployed example of bodies being uni-
tised. Lacan is referring here to the slave owned by the master, not the
pervert.
14. SXXII, 18/3/75.
15. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Triumph of Religion’, in The Triumph of Religion,
Preceded by Discourse to Catholics, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity,
2013), p. 73.
16. Jacques Lacan, ‘Religions and the Real’, trans. Russell Grigg, in The
Lacanian Review, No.1: Oh My God(s)! (London: NLS, 2016), p. 12.
17. SVII, p. 121.
18. SXXIII, p. 50.
19. Stuart Schneiderman, ‘Art According to Lacan’, Newsletter of the Freudian
Field 2, no. 1 (1988), p. 17.
20. SXXII, 11/3/75.
22. SXII, 20/1/65.
23. Jacques Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’, unofficial, trans. Jack W. Stone, p. 5. Autres
écrits, p. 16.
24. Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’, p. 5. Autres écrits, p. 16.
25. SIX, 9/5/62.
26. SIX, 7/3/62.
27. Miller, ‘Mathemes’, p. 35.
28. A matheme is simply a letter that denotes a concept without descriptive
signification. In this instance, the subject (S) is barred (/).We will look in
more detail at Lacan’s use of letters and formalisation in Chap. 3.
29. Miller, ‘Mathemes’, pp. 38–39.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Routledge 2003), p. 113.
Italics original.
31. Miller, ‘Mathemes’, p. 44.
33. SXIII, 15/12/65.
34. SXIII, 30/3/66.
35. SXX, p. 119.

36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Jacques Lacan, ‘Preface’, in Anika Lemaire, Jacques Lacan (London: RKP,
1977), p. xiii.
39. SXIV, 16/11/66.
40. SXXIII, p. 20.
42. Jacques Lacan, ‘L’étourdit’ (second turn), unofficial, trans. Cormac
Gallagher, p. 2. Autres écrits, p. 470.
43. Lacan, ‘L’étourdit’ (second turn), p. 2. Autres écrits, p. 470.
44. Jack W. Stone, The Fantasy, Le Sinthome, and the “Babbling Pumpt of
Platinism”: From Geometry, to Topology, to Joyce (PhD diss., University of
Missouri, 1998), p. 21.
45. SXX, p. 94.
46. SXVI, 21/5/69.
47. Jeanne Granon-Lafont also uses this example in La topologie ordinaire de
Jacques Lacan (Paris: Points hors Ligne, 1985).
48. Jacques Lacan, ‘Postface to Seminar XI’, trans. Adrian Price, Hurly-Burly,
no. 7 (London: NLS, 2012), p. 21.
50. SXVII, p. 48.
51. We discuss the distinction between conscious knowledge (connaissance)
and the unconscious knowledge (savoir) of the signifying chain in the
fourth part of this chapter.
52. SXVII, p. 48.
53. Ibid., p. 13.
54. SXIII, 30/3/66.
55. SXII, 10/3/65.
56. SXIV, 15/2/67.
57. SXX, p. 29.
58. Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 28–29.
59. SXX, p. 18.
60. Ibid., p. 33.
61. SXII, 9/12/64.
62. See: Leupin, Lacan Today, pp. 129–134.
64. Ibid., p. 428.
65. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis
(London: Routledge, 1996), p. 114.
99
66. Jacques Lacan, ‘Radiophonie’, unofficial, trans. Jack W. Stone, p. 10.
Autres écrits, p. 416.
67. Quoted in Gregory D. Chaitin, Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 197.
68. Quoted in Pluth, Signifiers and Acts, p. 36.
69. Pluth, Signifiers and Acts, p. 39.
70. Lacan, ‘Radiophonie’, p. 11. Autres écrits, p. 416.
71. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (Second Part), in The
72. SXVII, p. 108.
73. Tom Eyers, Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), p. 38. Italics original.
74. SXX, p. 143.
75. Ibid., p. 37.
76. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London: Faber, 1939), pp. 298, 17.
77. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 3.1.
78. SXX, p. 23.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid.
83. SXX, p. 18.
85. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Milanese Intuitions’, trans. Thelma Sowley, Mental
Online: International Journal of Mental Health and Applied Psychoanalysis
12 (2003), p. 5.
86. Ibid., p. 544.
89. Adrian Johnston, ‘Lacking Causes: Privative Causality from Locke and
Kant to Lacan and Deacon’, in Speculations VI (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum
Books, 2015), pp. 49–50.
90. SXX, p. 135.
91. SXI, p. xxxix.
92. SIX, 21/2/62.
93. Ibid.
94. SXX, p. 142.
95. SIX, 13/6/62.
96. SXI, p. 43.
97. Ibid., p. 26.

98. SX, p. 132.
99. SXI, p. 26. Italics original.
100. SIX, 9/5/62.
101. SXI, p. 154.
102. SXIII, 23/3/66.
103. Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 54.
104. SXI, p. 214. Italics original.
105. SXI, pp. 213–215.
106. SIX, 21/3/62.
107. SX, p. 134.
108. SXX, p. 5.
109. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Marcus Weigelt (London:
Penguin, 2007), p. 63.
110. SX, p. 132.
111. SXIII, 30/3/66.
112. SX, p. 133.
113. SIX, 7/3/62.
114. Ibid.
115. Ibid.
116. SX, p. 136.
117. SXI, p. 235.
118. SVII, p. 54.
119. Fink, The Lacanian Subject, p. 62.
120. SVII, p. 54.
121. Ibid., p. 56.
122. Ibid., p. 67.
123. SXVII, p. 112.
126. SVII, p. 69.
127. Ibid.
129. SXXI, 19/2/74.
130. SVII, p. 62.
132. SXI, p. 154.
133. SIX, 20/6/62.
134. SXVI, 21/5/69.
101
135. Ibid. A further question also arises: how can that which has zero dimen-
sions—the point at infinity—be a “supporting point” for something so
logically and materially robust as a knot? Lacan’s answer is “wedging.” We
will see what he means by this in Chap. 4.
136. SXIV, 16/11/66.
138. SXVII, p. 30.
139. SIX, 6/12/61.
141. Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Borsteels (London:
Continuum, 2009), p. 188.
143. Joan Copjec, Imagine there’s no Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2002), p. 192.
144. SVII, p. 71.
145. Ibid., p. 139.
147. Ibid., p. 264.
148. Quoted in Copjec, Imagine, p. 185.
149. See Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1994), pp. 15–38.
150. SXI, p. 92.
151. SXIII, 4/5/66.
152. Copjec, Imagine, pp. 185–188.
153. Ibid., p. 187. Italics original.
154. Ibid., pp. 186–187.
155. SX, p. 133.
156. Copjec, Imagine, p. 189.
157. Ibid., pp. 186–189. Italics original.
158. Readers seeking a formal presentation of the passage from the artist’s plane
of projection to the mathematician’s real projective plane can find one in
Jean-Pierre Georgin and Erik Porge’s article which comes complete with
over twenty diagrams: ‘Above the Horizon there is no Sky’, The Letter:
Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis 43 (Dublin, 2010), pp. 53–77.
159. SXIII, 11/5/66.
160. Juan-David Nasio, ‘Objet a and the Cross-cap’, in Lacan: Topologically
Speaking, eds. Ellie Ragland and Dragan Milanovic (New York: Other
Press, 2004), pp. 99–101.
161. Nasio, ‘Objet a’, p. 100.

163. Ibid., p. 3. Autres écrits, p. 472.
164. I take the distinction between the ideal of science and a particular science
from Jean-Claude Milner’s ‘Lacan and the Ideal of Science’, in Lacan and
the Human Sciences, ed. Alexandre Leupin (Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 1991), pp. 27–42.
166. SXX, p. 15.
168. This schema is suggested by Jeanne Lafont in Jacques Siboni, ‘Jacques
Lacan and the Projective Plane’, Online video clip, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=GGG85uY-Tk0 (accessed 14 November 2015).
169. Jacques Lacan, ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite
to Any Subject Whatever’, in The Structuralst Controversy: The Languages
of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 194.
170. SVII, p. 119.
171. Jacques Lacan, ‘Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father’, in On the
Names-of-the-Father, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), p. 65.
173. Fink, p. 84.
174. SXI, p. 89.
175. Ibid., 11/5/66.
176. Ibid., 25/5/66.
177. Ibid., 18/5/66.
178. SXXIII, p. 104.
180. SXX, p. 39.
181. SXIX, 21/6/72.
182. Nasio, ‘Objet a’, pp. 110–111.
183. SIX, 13/6/62.
184. Ibid., 23/5/62.
185. Ibid., 27/6/62.
187. SIX, 27/6/62.
188. Ibid., 13/6/62.
3
Topology and the Re-turn to Freud
3.1 Encore
In ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, Derrida asks us to imagine a speaker
addressing his audience:
He declares rather insolently that he is setting out to improvise. He is going

to have to invent on the spot, and he asks himself once more [encore] “Just
what am I going to have to invent?” But simultaneously he seems to be
implying, not without presumptuousness, that the improvised speech will
constantly remain unpredictable, that is to say as usual, ‘still’ [‘encore’] new,
original, unique—in a word, inventive. And in fact, by having at least
invented something with his very first sentence, such an orator would be
breaking the rules, would be breaking with convention, etiquette, the rhet-
oric of modesty, in short, with all the conditions of social interaction. An
invention … inserts a disorder into the peaceful ordering of things, it dis-
regards the proprieties. Apparently without the patience of a preface—it is
itself a new preface—this is how it unsettles givens.1

If the measure of an invention is the extent to which it introduces a “dis-

order” into regulated and settled convention, by virtue of an unequivocal
break with the prefatory order, then psychoanalysis certainly merits such
a distinction while also acting as a pertinent example of the difficulty that
anything which is “new, original, unique” has in “constantly remain[ing]
unpredictable.” As Lacan never tired of asserting (still, encore…), no
sooner had the Freudian discovery emerged, than it was subject to a rapid
calcification at the hands of disciples who rushed to reinsert the ‘Freudian
Thing’ into a pre-existing “order of things.” In this sense, Derrida teases
out an important nuance, complicating the relatively mundane assertion
of an invention’s novelty: in remaining unique—a uniquity that is re-
established with every subsequent encore—does the unique, precisely by
virtue of the retention of its uniquity, risk rehabilitation as a settled given?
Does the unique thereby become its own preface, rather than becoming
“itself a new preface”? Must it remain in flux, in a constant undefined
state of ‘becoming,’ disjoined from institution and publication or, even
worse, simply ineffable and silent? Can the ‘Freudian Thing’ be repeated?
“[T]he unconscious,” Lacan asserts, “is Freud’s invention … in the
sense of a discovery.”2 While this is an unusual formulation (one discov-
ers what already existed and invents what did not previously exist), it is
also an apposite one: spoken material must be constructed and invented
in analysis because it is in such material that the unconscious is discov-
ered. The unconscious cannot become part of the convention with which
it breaks; it is not novel in the sense of a discovered or invented existent
thing (a definable substance or content) that ages by becoming known;
it repeatedly remains unique because of the Möbian temporality in which
it operates as an ex-sistent action graspable only in its effects—the non-
tautologous speech that results from a Möbian circuit.
If psychoanalytic practice amounts to “a discipline which is also a new
era in thinking,” what “distinguishes us from those who have preceded us”
is the insistence that “‘disciple’ is to be distinguished from the word disci-
pline.”3 We are reminded here of the distinction articulated in Chap. 1—
that between coherence (which attracts disciples) and rigour (which
requires discipline). What starkly separates psychoanalysis from its own
precedents in science and philosophy is its break with the traditional logic
of precedence itself. In other words, its novelty is defined not merely by
3 Topology and the Re-turn to Freud
105
its distance from particular precedents but by the position its disciplined
non-disciples adopt with respect to the general figure of precedence.
It does not itself become a precedent—a hive of information or laws to
which the disciple refers—but a disciplined, or constant (still, encore …),
refusal of precedence in the form of a pre-existing given such as an inter-
pretative template that would obscure the unconscious that disrupts the
precedents, identifications and narratives upon which subjective (self-)
knowledge is based.
The ‘Freudian Thing’ announces itself, according to Lacan’s audacious
prosopopoeia, as “‘I, truth, speak’”—an “enigma” that cannot be captured
by “the tawdry finery of your proprieties”4; the extraneous “veil” that Samuel
Beckett so memorably described as being akin to “a Victorian bathing suit
or the imperturbability of a true gentleman.”5 As Derrida notes, there can
be no “rhetoric of modesty” here. In this “new era of thinking,” “truth no
longer involves thought; strangely enough, it now seems to involve things:
rebus, it is through you that I communicate.”6 Truth does not emerge
through conscious knowledge or thought, ideally posed in the form of a
speech that is either an immaculate expression of intention or a perfect
description of an object (truth as adaequatio rei et intellectus), it can instead
be heard in the constantly unpredictable slips and homophonic equivoca-
tions (l’une-bévue), produced not as meaning effects (the conjunction of
signifier and signified) but in the ‘thinginess’ of lalangue, the materiality of
the letter (the disjunction of signifier from signified).
Despite the shock it induces in the subject of conscious knowledge,
this truth is not straightforwardly unique: it can only materialise in rep-
etition; in the failure of the signifier to produce self-identical “signifying
uniquity” (the Möbian circuit’s anticipation and retroaction [S1↔S2]).
Since one signifier always requires another, the logic of repetition subverts
precedence as such: the “initiatory operation”7 of “original repetition”8 is
not the repetition of an origin but origin as repetition. Urverdrängung
institutes the unconscious when a signifier is constituted, through repeti-
tion, as the erased determinant of a chain. The ‘Freudian Thing’ arises not
in an original and inventive iteration, but in reiteration. At the end of the
third section of Chap. 2 we briefly outlined the topology of interpreta-
tion where a cut applied to the Möbius strip separates signifier (S1) from
signifier (S2) and makes (dis)appear the barred subject. The c ombination
of signifiers need not occur in a chain—indeed, in lalangue it is often a

case of letters, not signifiers, being combined. Take, for example, the title
of a particular écrit: ‘L’étourdit’. Phonetically, we hear l’étourdi and might
understand it as an allusion to Molière’s play, L’Étourdi (The Blunderer).
Christian Fierens outlines how this understanding is invalidated by a
reading that notes the addition of a letter (t) which makes of the con-
struction a rebus that, since it is no longer a substantive participle, makes
no sense unless we make “a pronoun of the l’ and a verb of étourdit: ‘that
amuses and bewilders (étourdit) him.’” Even then, our reading of the let-
ter compels an insistent question: “where has the grammatical subject
[him] of this literal sequence l’étourdit gone?” In this respect, “‘L’étourdit’
goes beyond the meanings of its components” and spurs an interpretation
that hits upon “the disappearance-apparition of a subject.”9 It is a rebus
that remains irreducible to any of the particular significations that it
engenders. In this minimal combinatory of repetition (S or l’étourdi—S′
or l’étourdit) self-identical meaning has faltered and the subject has (dis)
appeared. The circuit has not closed itself in a single turn; the retroaction
induced by a reading has produced both a surfeit and a deficit of mean-
ing. Furthermore, the title is itself a meta-linguistic comment on the very
mechanism that it sets in play and which the écrit itself will theorise and
utilise: “the turns said” (in ‘L’étourdit’ we also hear “les tours dit”). This
meta-linguistic detachment (the description of the mechanism that it
provides) is made possible only insofar as it partakes in the homophony;
in, that is, the displacement and turns inherent to language. For Lacan,
reading traces this trajectory of the Möbian double turn; it refuses to
remain at the single turn of unitary meaning which takes language to be
a tool of communication akin to telepathy. Finally, as if to emphasise that
it is a reading that is at stake, Lacan puts in play the very same silent letter
(t) that is found in the title of his Écrits.
To engage in psychoanalysis as a discipline without disciples, to read
the unconscious, is to repudiate precedence again, still, encore. And yet,
psychoanalysis is concerned with little else. What precedent, the psycho-
analyst must ask, is compelling the subject to repeat? This is a question
that concerns not just the relation between signifiers but the relation
between the subject and the real. While the analysand is determined by
his own psychic precedent—which, as the causal, missed encounter with
107
the Other’s lack, is always a precedence without precedent—psychoanaly-

sis exists precisely because this preface, which is both connected to and
separate from the narrative chain, is not “the peaceful ordering of things”
but is itself the locus of traumatic disorder, stimulating and determining
all manner of repetitious missteps. There must, in other words, be some
libidinal and affective charge that powers repetition and lends its various
manifestations a purpose that subtends apparent coincidence. Fierens10
points here to the Ratman, who, when beginning to speak about his
obsessional fears and wishes, would defend himself from their jolting
effect by producing a “rapidly produced ‘aber [but]’ accompanied by a
gesture of repudiation.”11 Freud noted that this S1 (aber) had a specific S2
(abér), thanks to the unconventional stress his analysand laid on the sec-
ond syllable, in which he perceives defence (Abwehr). The detour of “the
turns said [les tours dit]” loop around what is, for the analysand, unspeak-
able. Homophony and grammar (a conjunction [aber] becomes a noun
[Abwehr]) constitute two of the three operations an analyst interprets.
The third is “logic, without which interpretation would be imbecilic.”12
Unconscious formations have a logical structure: the lapsus indicates the
impossible, the subject’s unspeakable precedent. It is in instances of failure
that truth grazes the real.
The encounter is always a missed encounter. If Freud’s “invention” of
the unconscious should be taken “in the sense of a discovery,” this is
also the “discovery of repetition”: the dynamic of “the relation between
thought and the real.” The subject’s repetitious thought “always avoids …
the same thing. Here, the real is that which always comes back to the same
place—to the place where the subject insofar as he thinks, where the res
cogitans, does not meet it.”13 This inassimilable precedent remains. It is an
ex-sistent prefatory disorder or primal scene upon which no consistent or
coherent order of ends and origins can be founded. An encounter with
the Other’s lack (das Ding) has taken place, an occurrence that derives
its traumatic value from the nascent subject’s inability to understand
what he has been privy to. Defying comprehension and articulation, this
unthinkable encounter is missed; as the real, it eludes apprehension and
continues to do so.
Therefore, repetition is not a return to origins—the single turn of an
exhaustive biography (reality) that seamlessly unites cause and effect:
“repetition is not reproduction … To reproduce is what one thought one
could do in the optimistic days of catharsis. One had the primal scene in
reproduction as today one has pictures of the great masters for 9 francs
50.”14 Furthermore, contrary to Freud’s suggestion in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle, “repetition … bears no relation to Nietzsche’s ‘eternal return’”15
of the same. The real remains “beyond the automaton, the return, the com-
ing-back, the insistence of the signs, by which we see ourselves governed
by the pleasure principle.”16 This absent preface is the sexual real of the
unconscious and the foundation of repetition which, as a defensive avoid-
ance (e.g. Abwehr), constitutes the subject’s particular mode of jouissance.
***
In Seminar XIV Lacan presented his “logic of fantasy’” which, pre-
saging his logic of sexuation, he insists is “a ‘logic’ which is not a logic
… a totally unprecedented logic,”17 quite distinct from the “first”18
Aristotelian logic. Where the combination of three letters in the latter
syllogistic logic (i.e. all x [men] are y [mortal]; z [Socrates] is x; therefore
z is y) led to the real being subsumed by the universal (x)—according to
Lacan, Aristotle “did not believe he could support th[e] real by any other
thing than the particular [z]”19—in Lacan’s three letters (S-barred<>a),
that are put in place by the cross-cap, the real is granted its ex-sistence,
extimacy and irreducibility. Furthermore, he notes that the prefatory
universal order par excellence, the Pascalian “God of philosophers,” the
infinite, enveloping sphere that secures Descartes’ cogito as a thinking
being, the “divine, empty Other” “sustained in the philosophical tradi-
tion,”20 is wholly discredited by Freud’s discovery. If the totalised Other
in the form of the “universe of language … does not exist,” this is “[p]
recisely because of the existence of the object a”21 as that which is “falls”
at the origin—or, more correctly (since it never existed prior to its fall/
ex-sistence), lost as origin—and which compels repetition. A belief in its
existence protects the subject from the Other’s desire/lack; it elides the
sexual real and shores up the Other.
This cause is a strange precedent: both irredeemably beyond vocalisa-
tion and yet present as an absence in every instance of desirous repetition,
it results in an operation of thought that, despite being inflected by a
preface, is not the recollection of a “simple return” but is instead “a think-
ing of return, a repetition thinking.”22 If the inassimilable real presages
a “new era in thinking,” by delegitimising the philosopher’s omnipotent
109
and non-deceitful Other as the original and final guarantor of thought,

this does not license a “free thinking” which is “like the freedom of asso-
ciation … enough said.”23 As Lacan well knew, the death of God does not
mean that everything is permissible. To ask the analysand to make like
Derrida’s speaker and freely improvise, to “pass along the paths of free
association,” does not result in “a slipshod discourse.” On the contrary,
it is merely the initial step toward discovering “what conditions this dis-
course beyond our instructions,” whereby the analyst can “bring into play
this element … called interpretation.”24 A paradoxical logic (of fantasy)
emerges: if the real injects a disorder into the order of daily life, it also
introduces an order into the apparent disorder of free association.
As we have seen, this logic of fantasy is also a topology. There is a
relation between “thought and the real” in the logic of fantasy which
is itself not, to recall Lacan’s incisive expression, “condemned to total
liberty”: fantasy always veils and avoids the same thing; the real which
“bears witness to a certain torsion”25 in fantasmatic reality. The analyst
must isolate “fantasy in its relationship to the real”26 by “find[ing] in each
structure, a way to define the laws of transformation which guarantee for
this fantasy, in the deduction of the statements of unconscious discourse
the place of an axiom.”27 Fantasy is a topology: the analyst must discern
the axiomatic, qualitative invariable that remains throughout the various
quantitative transformations that the fundamental fantasy undergoes as it
re-stages the missed encounter between “thought and the real.”
***
How can a thought best confront this new era in repetition thinking?
“If Freud retains our interest,” if he remains unique, this is not due to
what Lacan refers to as “the thinking of Freud” which is always vulnerable
to the “historian of philosophy,” who is able to “minimis[e]” this thinking
by isolating a particular point of intellectual conservatism at which Freud
has failed to “go beyond”28 what preceded him. The Freudian subversion
could then be dissolved in a genealogical soup. No, what is at stake for
Lacan “is the object that Freud discovered” which he intends to “redis-
cover” by “following the trace of this thinking of Freud”29; by following,
that is, the relation between Freud’s thought and the real. Freud’s dis-
covery is this relation; the “discovery of repetition.” At stake, then, is not
only the “Freudian Thing,” as the discourse of the Other/unconscious,
but also das Ding; the real void around which repetition coils. If Lacan
is to do justice to Freud, it is not a return to Freud that is required (the
“reproduction” of a “great master”) but a repetition of Freud. What, Lacan
asks, was the real of Freud’s thought?
Does following Freud’s thought, or, indeed, an analysand’s thought, to
the letter—which “only mark[s] out for us … what object is involved”30—
constitute a research? Is an ideal repetition of discovery possible? The “irresist-
ible and natural tendency … of every constituted subjectivity” is to “fail to
recognise” this object—a commonplace failing that “redoubles the drama
of what is called research.”31 The researcher—the one who already knows
what he is searching for and complacently proceeds from the platform of
an established reserve of information such as an exhaustive typology that
would make psychoanalysis a zoology—always avoids the same thing; that
which, by its very nature, can only be missed. The disorder of novelty is
elided by the researcher who begins to “do what the word research [recher-
ché] implies, namely to go round in circles,”32 executing an immaculate and
untroubled return to a prefatory law, a “theory of the unconscious”—as
drearily demonstrated by applied psychoanalysis. In this respect, reflects
Lacan, “I have never regarded myself as a researcher. As Picasso once said
… I do not seek, I find.”33
In Seminar XIV, Lacan, reconsidering this dismissal, gnomically
declared that “research [recherché] … [is] [n]othing other than what we
can ground as being the radical origin of Freud’s approach concerning his
object, nothing else can give it to us than what appears to be the irreducible
starting point of the Freudian novelty, namely, repetition.”34 The “starting
point”—the birth of psychoanalysis, prior to intellectual consolidation
and institutionalisation or the discernment of an object that, once found,
could be programmatically researched and re-found—was itself research as
repetition. Repetition is, of course, also the “starting point” of the barred
subject. Freud’s thinking and object align when the material of research
is itself research qua repetition: “This was the first discovery. Freud said
to subjects, ‘Speak … let’s see what knowledge it is that you encounter’
… And that necessarily led him to this discovery … [that] the essential
thing in determining what one is concerned with when exploring the
unconscious is repetition.”35 Psychoanalysis is the discovery of repetition
through repetition that remains novel by being the repetition of discovery.
111
While the Freudian Thing speaks through repetition, this avoidance

is not to be tracked interminably, lest the subject remain trapped in his
circumlocutions. The purpose of psychoanalytic interpretation—a reduc-
tion of signification, leading toward “the analytic Thing”36; the punc-
tiform yet irreducible “hole-point” anchoring the subject’s particular
“economy of jouissance”37—is therefore to be distinguished from that of
“the hermeneutic demand, which is precisely that which seeks … the ever
new and the never exhausted signification.”38 The rigour of the psychoana-
lytic discipline will not result in the coherence that the disciple seeks. If
the “real is that which always lies behind [the signifying] automaton,” it is
this real that, “throughout Freud’s research … is the object of his concern”;
a research that does not attempt to exhaust signification or reconstruct
meaning but to ask of a subject afflicted by a “repetition dream”39: “What
is the first encounter, the real, that lies behind the fantasy?”40 How can
research into an object that cannot be defined even begin, let alone repeat
itself? With this question, prompted by the unspeakable real that causes
and blocks repetition’s polysemy, Lacan turned toward asemic resources:
logic, mathemes and topology.
***
Fortunately, we need not merely imagine Derrida’s hypothetical
speaker who seeks “as usual, ‘still [encore]’” to remain original:
What can I still [encore] have to say to you after all the time this has lasted,
without having all the effects that I would like? Well, it is precisely because
it doesn’t that I never run out of things to say.
Nevertheless, since one cannot say it all, and for good reason, I am
reduced to this narrow course, which is such that at every moment I must
be careful not to slip back into what has already been done on the basis of what
has been said.
That is why today I am going to try, once again [encore], to stay this dif-
ficult ground-breaking course, whose horizon is strange, qualified, as it is,
by my title—Encore.41
In this passage, that which is “ground-breaking” announces itself from

a particular logical locus; the “not-all [pas-tout]” which can, for the
moment, be thought of as that which makes itself felt following any
attempt to “say it all.” Lacan can still go on, he can still muster another
encore with the Séminaire entering its third decade, precisely because no
symbolic “order of things” can totalise itself. This is the state of affairs to
which the psychoanalytic clinic testifies. However, there is, in analysis, a
certain success that can only be ensured through the failure of a missed
encounter: it is the particular way in which the analysand repeatedly fails
to produce a coherent and consistent discourse which might say and
explain everything that offers the analyst material with which to work.
This is Lacan’s “narrow course” which traces the paradoxical originality
of repetition without “slip[ping] back” into what is already known: “The
approach to the real is narrow. And it is from haunting it that psycho-
analysis looms forth.”42
In this respect, Lacan is, as a speaker addressing his audience—repeat-
edly, but unpredictably, improvising and inventing—in the role of the
analysand; his circuitous speech fails to find resolution through totalisa-
tion. The real, however, is not simply outside discourse, as any topog-
raphy might have it; it is instead extimate—a topological, internally
excluded centre, marking and inflecting speech. “[T]hose are words,”
writes Beckett in The Unnameable, “open on the silence, looking out on
the silence, straight out, why not, all this time on the brink of silence
… I’m shut up, the silence is outside, outside, inside.”43 In the stumble,
the scrambled word, the impossible to say can be heard. As Jean-Claude
Milner neatly puts it, Wittgenstein’s discursive embargo (“whereof one
cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) would be accurate “if only
what we cannot speak about consented to be silent.”44 There is a mar-
riage of impossibility and necessity; the fact that the real does not stop
not being written does not stop being written: “repetition,” as “clarif[ied]
with the glancing light of [Freud’s] discovery,” sees “great Necessity” insis-
tently “exercised in the Logos.”45 The fact that the real escapes us cannot
escape us. Therefore, the psychoanalytic not-all is not simply effaced by
the encore; it is instead precisely through this repetitious and distortive
encore that it emerges. It is lost when the analyst is not receptive to failure;
when he believes in the Other who will allow one to say it all.
Reflecting on his own intervention in the “order of things,” Lacan notes
that “I have been a vehicle for much of what is known as the Freudian
thing. I even gave the title The Freudian Thing to something I wrote.
113
When it comes to what I call the real, however, I invented, because it

imposed itself on me.”46 Once again, we cannot tell whether this is an
invention or a discovery: the subject’s real is neither brought into exis-
tence by interpretation (invention) and nor does it pre-exist interpreta-
tion (discovery); it instead ex-sists as that which is negatively traced by the
analysand’s constructions. It is the real that, as we have seen, Lacan gave to
his readers so that they might unglue themselves from the legacy of Freud
(the precedent of sens that, according to Lacan, the Freudian institution
erected). The invention of the Lacanian Thing is, paradoxically, both with
and without precedent: the real has been “imposed” on Lacan—by Freud,
by his analysands, by, no doubt, his own unconscious—and yet its mode
of imposition, its emergence through repetition, through the torsion and
circumlocution of language—Freud’s language, his analysand’s language,
his own language—never ceases to remain unpredictable. The real is a prod-
uct of the return to Freud, the repetition spurred by an initial encounter:
“It is to the very extent that Freud truly made a discovery … that it may
be said that the real is my symptomatic response to it.”47 The symptom is
an inventive response on the part of the subject to an original trauma; a
repeated response through which what is impossible to speak about speaks.
Shoshana Felman argues that:
Freud’s originality is indeed not unlike the originality of a trauma, which

takes on meaning only through the deferred action of a return. Freud’s
discovery of the unconscious can thus itself be looked at as a sort of primal
scene, a cultural trauma, whose meaning—or originality in cultural his-
tory—comes to light only through Lacan’s significantly transferential,
symptomatic repetition.48
Lacan’s repetition of the Freudian trauma—which is itself the “discovery

of repetition”; the discovery of the way in which the real is (not) spo-
ken—produces the real as that which inhibits the deferred attribution of
meaning through a return. Rather than taking on meaning, the Freudian
trauma is renewed. With his famous late aphorism—“the unconscious …
is real”49—Lacan’s repetition returns psychoanalysis to the stakes of its ini-
tial discovery: the impossibility, which the sexual real of the unconscious
presents, of any ideal return to origins or resolution in meaning. Lacan’s
symptomatic response to the Freudian trauma traumatises ego psycholo-

gists who, after Freud, had begun to believe that one really could return
and say it all, thereby betraying “the traumatism of the birth of analysis.”50
This project would culminate with the topology of the Borromean knot.
With this topology, Lacan “claim[s] to have invented” a writing of the real
that possesses “the value of what is generally called a trauma.”51
Preparatory to an investigation of Lacan’s attempts to leave a legacy
of trauma by giving a “un bout de réel” with his nodal writings, we will
outline how he got to that point through examination of his reading of
the relation between (Freud’s) thought and the real.
3.2 A Möbian Method

For Derrida, the invention’s repetition is integral to the invention itself.
It must be recognised and “counter-signed.” It is not, in other words,
an absolute and mute singularity, but rather only “begins by being sus-
ceptible to repetition, exploitation, reinscription.”52 In this respect, the
invention is not dissimilar to the S1 as that which announces itself only
through its own erasure in signifying repetition. This ‘loss’ of self-identity
or signifying uniquity results in the subject’s splitting (Spaltung), which
is, perhaps, a more recognisably Lacanian response to Freud, who, by
“inventing psychoanalysis,” introduces “a method of detecting a trace of
thinking, where thinking itself masks it by recognising itself differently in
it—differently to the way that the trace designates it.” “[T]his is,” Lacan
declares, “what I have promoted.”53 This method of tracing the topology
of repetition (inverted redoubling) characterises not just psychoanalytic
“method” but also Lacan’s return to Freud. Both involve a “topology of
return” that is really more of a topology of the re-turn.
If the Möbius strip makes explicit “the necessity, in the structure, of a
double circuit”—the traversal of the double loop that allows one to redis-
cover, repeat and read the point of departure—“[t]his is exactly the sense
that I would give to my method with respect to what Freud taught.”54
Lacan had by this point (1966) become less comfortable with the char-
acterisation of his method as an uncomplicated return; as a motto it
had served its purpose by originally distinguishing his teaching from
115
“the confused manifestations of a colossal deviation in analysis”55—

detours that required straightening out—but it did not adequately cap-
ture what was at stake in the originality of his repetition. Delivered two
years prior to this statement, Seminar XI had marked a fundamental
break in Lacan’s teaching since it, unlike the seminars that immediately
preceded it, was not solely dedicated to an appraisal of a single Freudian
concept (e.g. Seminar IX: Identification or Seminar X: Anxiety). Instead,
Lacan set the foundations of his future work by concentrating on four
Grund-begriffs: the unconscious, transference, the drive and repetition
itself. Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, which was primarily
given to a topological account of the object a—here notable for being a
concept that Lacan laid claim to having “invented”56—was emblematic of
this deviation. If the first decade of the Séminaire had ostensibly entailed
a return to a unique origin, a return to an unconscious whitewashed by
the ego, tracing the trajectory of the single loop of the circle in which
ideal self-identical (re)union is realised, what followed would be a rep-
etition or re-turn: a traversal of the double loop and the emergence of
novelty. The research into “Freud’s object” could finally begin… with a
deviation granted by repetition.
Immediately prior to this account of the topology of his reading strat-
egy, Lacan attempted to pose it in language: “To rethink [Freud], that is
my method … [b]ut I prefer the second word if, precisely, you study it in
order to take it apart a little bit, you realise what the word method can
mean exactly: a path taken up again afterwards.”57 Regardless of the appeal
to exactitude that a term such as method superficially implies, the term is
itself precisely that which does not “mean exactly.” Lacan is here alluding
to the word’s Greek derivation: meta (μετά—beyond, after, with, among,
etc.) and hodos (ὁδός—way, journey, etc.). As he remarks, the preposi-
tion, meta, is, like many prepositions, extraordinarily rich in its etymol-
ogy and is guaranteed to drag those who attach a “pre-eminence … in the
study of linguistics to meaning” into “an inextricable labyrinth.”58 While
Aristotle’s Metaphysics influences our standard usage of the preposition
as designating transcendence, meta actually accounts for a large, and not
necessarily congruent, variety of relationships. In other words, meta, con-
trary to expectation, is itself a fine example of why there is, for Lacan, no
metalanguage. If psychoanalysis “does not claim to reconstitute any new
whole,” it is precisely “in this that it inaugurates a method.”59
In Seminar VII, having noted that meta can imply both “with” and
“after,” Lacan declares that “Meta is, properly speaking, that which
implies a break [coupure].”60 He takes as his support a line from Antigone
in which the titular heroine articulates her apparently unequivocal stance
with regards to Creon’s decree, which, she maintains, has nothing to do
with (μετά) her morality.61 Here, meta produces both a conjunction and
a radical separation, implying both continuity and discontinuity. The
method of Lacan’s return will mirror this double valence. It is worth
noting that Lacan’s translation of meta as coupure is not itself without
complications since “the break [coupure] … [is that which] the very pres-
ence of language inaugurates in the life of man.”62 Coupure could, in this
particular instance, be translated as cut; the Möbian cut of the signifier
which, by introducing “difference as such,” bars self-identity and moti-
vates a movement of re-turning that will never realise the ideal return.
Designating the imperfect self-intersection of signification, the cut car-
ries resonances of both a break and a repetition. This continuous dis-
continuity is itself a method; a hodos inaugurated by the primordial meta
whose double-looped trajectory structures the insubstantial subject.
In this brief search for meaning which Lacan encourages us to take
on, we have looped back to topology. Lacan himself, having concluded
that no definition perfectly captures meta’s diverse resonances, decides to
pass over to the topological structure which, we recall, offers “exactly the
sense” that Lacan wishes to ascribe to his rediscovery of Freud’s discovery.
But what exactly happens when one accomplishes a double circuit? It is
worth recalling here that when one has completed one circuit around the
Möbian hole—or, when, on a paper Möbius strip, one has reached the
‘other’ side of one’s starting point—the orientation is reversed (i.e. left
becomes right and vice versa). It will require another circuit to re-turn
to the original orientation: “with a single circuit … you only get back to
your starting point on the single condition of having reversed your orien-
tation in it. A non-orientable surface, which requires that after, as I might
say, having lost it [i.e. the starting point] twice, you will only rediscover
it by making two circuits.”63
What, then, had been accomplished by Freud’s first circuit (as a return
to a starting point that reversed this point’s orientation)? There is, in the
progress—we use this term dubiously—or method of Freud’s thought,
117
something strange which is the fastened, closed, completed character, even

though marked by a twist, through something which connects up with itself
in this point which I have for a long time underlined in his writing, as the
Spaltung of the ego, and which returns fully charged with the sense accumu-
lated in the course of a long exploration, that of his whole career, towards an
original point with a completely transformed sense, an original point from
which he started, almost, from the completely different notion of the
duplication of personality.
Let us say that he was able to transform completely this current notion
by the reference points of the unconscious, it is to it that at the end, in the
form of the division of the subject, he gave his definitive seal.64
Let us quickly flesh out Lacan’s skeletal account. As early as Breuer and
Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895), we can find references to a “split-
ting [spaltung] of consciousness” and a “spaltung of the psyche.”65 The
fundamental psychoanalytic subversion or “starting point” is already in
evidence here; already we can observe a conscious subject disjoined from
another scene: “The unconscious originates from the fact that the hysteric
does not know what she is saying.”66 This was renewed when, in the first
of the Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910), Freud referred to a “splitting
of the personality” between two independent “mental states”: a condition
in which “consciousness remains attached to one of the two states, we call
it the conscious mental state and the other, which is detached from it, the
unconscious one.”67 Spaltung remerged in the posthumously published ‘
The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1940) as Ich-spaltung.
Here, the ego (Ich) is not unified and coherent but is instead split. The cir-
cuit is completed; at this point “Freud’s pen stopped in articulo mortis” and
Lacan, seizing upon this mature revisiting of the original point of departure,
takes it up again by railing against “the common sense of psychoanalysts”—
the sens of the group—“which banishes that splitting from all considered
reflection, isolating itself instead in a notion like the weakness of the ego.”68
According to this common sens, if the ego’s split could be resolved this would
in turn eradicate the problems that arise from the primary split.
There is a certain ambiguity here: did Freud only make one circuit
(from the starting point to the reversal of orientation) or did he in fact
make two? Lacan’s references to the “closed, completed character” of
Freud’s trajectory, his anticipatory-retroactive progress toward “an original
point from which he started,” suggest that Freud did indeed make two
circuits, that he had not left behind old revelations but instead re-turned
to them. As far as Lacan is concerned, it is the ego psychologists, not
Freud, who remained attached to the reversal of orientation—that is,
the passage from the “splitting of consciousness” between a conscious
and unconscious state to Ich-spaltung—re-directing their attention away
from the unconscious and toward the ego. This is why Lacan states that
“[w]hat I have to do is very exactly to make the same circuit [tour] a
second time, but in such a structure, doing it a second time has absolutely
not the sense of a pure and simple reduplication.”69 Repetition, and not
return, is the mechanism of spaltung—the “two times” that “make” the
subject and make a return to an ideal origin impossible—and the method
of Lacan’s rereading of Freud. We know that rather than taking this Ich-
spaltung to be a relatively peripheral crack in egoic harmony, Lacan gen-
eralises this fault as constitutive of the subject as such. The split occurs
neither between ego and Id nor within a flimsy ego but is instead the very
condition of possibility for the inconsistent psychic structure. Indeed,
even at the point at which Lacan will claim that Freud’s “definitive seal”
is found in this postulation of the “division of the subject,” we can recog-
nize Lacan’s “counter-signature” and the initiation of the second circuit.
A notorious feature of this second circuit is that division becomes the
consequence of the coupure caused by the signifier. However, even this
apparently novel introduction of structuralist linguistics suffers from an
ambiguity that Lacan wilfully nurtures: “Starting with Freud, the uncon-
scious becomes a chain of signifiers that repeats and insists somewhere
… In this formulation, which is mine only in the sense that it conforms
as closely to Freud’s texts as to the experience they opened up, the crucial
term is the signifier.”70 To which circuit does the signifier belong? If, for
Lacan, it is “only a question of language in what [Freud] discovers for us
of the unconscious,” this apparently elementary pillar, from which “[w]
e must depart … to revise all that [Freud] advances in the progress of an
experience”—the act of “mak[ing] the same circuit a second time”—still
needed to be “found at the departure of this return to Freud.”71 Of course,
a second circuit’s point of departure is a first circuit’s point of conclusion;
it is a point shared by both circuits.
119
The logic of the signifier, while already implicit in the first circuit, is,
like any signifier, only rendered retroactively legible by the retroactive
second circuit; by Lacan’s reading of Freud. And, just as no signifier can
be subject to a pure reduplication (no signifier can return in the form of
an identical reiteration), Lacan’s second circuit, while of course being
inseparable from the first circuit (it is not absolutely novel), is nonetheless
different and cannot avoid the inevitable effacement of the ideal origin.
In other words, if no signifier can describe itself without losing its self-
identity in difference, we should not expect Lacan’s “mak[ing] [of ] the
same circuit a second time” to amount to an absolutely faithful return or
for its “discoveries” to be absolutely heterogeneous to Freud’s circuit. This
double-loop, the twisted Möbian space of which ensures that one returns
to an “original point” with a “transformed sense,” is the (topo)logic of the
signifier: there has been a twist in the return. Here, the logic of the signi-
fier is both what Lacan’s second circuit (re)discovers and what directs the
method—a hodos guided by the impossibility (which the signifier forces
us to realise) of the meta-language—of this second circuit.
Linguistics was an inherent, but unnamed, part of Freud’s first cir-
cuit and came to be recognised by Lacan’s reading: Wahrnehmungszeichen
(‘signs of perception’), as a series of mnemic traces imprinted on the
layers of the subject’s unconscious/preconscious memory connecting
perception and consciousness in Freud’s first topography, are signifi-
ers.72 In this respect, Freud’s Entwurf (1895), and the early topography
established therein, “is very revealing of a kind of substructure of Freud’s
thought.”73 This striking presentation of the Entwurf as an uncontami-
nated point of origin—a “pure text” and “virgin source”74 of all successive
Freudian tributaries—indicates its importance for Lacan’s own formula-
tions. However, if it is “the true, solid backbone of Freud’s thought” it is
nonetheless a “hidden backbone” that will require Lacan to “return”75 to
it. As is so often the case, this return offers itself as the isolation of a “true”
Freud, but this figure will only be rendered visible after a certain refrac-
tion; a refraction that is more true to the text than the reigning “common
sens.” Indeed, no sooner has Lacan eulogised about this “pure text,” he is
telling his audience that “I am proposing not simply to be faithful to the
text of Freud and to be its exegete, as if it were the source of an unchang-
ing truth that was the model, mold and dress code to be imposed on all
our experience.”76 Lacan will meddle with this “virgin source” and renew
this truth so that it may retain its role as a “backbone.” How exactly does
Lacan perform this delicate reading?
The Entwurf confirmed two foundational principles of his own work;
the priority of the unconscious (perceptions are organised as traces by the
unconscious before they are accessible to consciousness) and its linguis-
tic structure (the associational field of neurons [signifiers]). The return to
Freud had been necessitated by the dilution, at the hands of ego psychol-
ogy, of a conceptual purity rediscovered in the Entwurf: the primacy of
the unconscious. Nevertheless, this text is not the source of a rigid and
bequeathed truth: what Lacan garners from this “substructure of Freud’s
thought” is nothing less than the substructure of Lacan’s thought; the
unconscious “structured like a language.” The fashion in which Lacan
proceeds is most typical: firstly the English translation (upon which the
French translation is modelled) is dismissed as being replete with “distor-
tions” of “original intuitions”—the particular object of Lacan’s ire being
the translation of Bahnungen for facilitations. Secondly, Lacan proposes
restoring the original word because it better facilitates his own transla-
tion: Bahnungen “suggests the creation of a continuous way, a chain, and
I even have the feeling that it can be related to the signifying chain.”77 As
for the traces or ‘signs of perception’ organised in this chain: “our read-
ing” “give[s] to these Wahrnehmungszeichen their true name of signifiers.”78
Lacan’s repetition has been neither a perfect return nor an absolute break.
***
In the short treatise on method titled ‘On a Purpose’, written espe-
cially for the 1966 publication of Écrits and offered as an introduction
to his two lectures that bookended Jean Hyppolite’s commentary on
Freud’s 1925 paper ‘Verneinung’ (‘Negation’), Lacan again discusses his
second circuit in terms of a topology. The “‘return to Freud’ has noth-
ing to do with a return to sources that could, here as elsewhere, signify
no more than a regression,” and instead takes on an “entirely different
meaning insofar as it is based on the subject’s topology, which can only
be elucidated through a second twist [tour] back on itself.”79 Lacan’s
return to Freud is based on this topology in two senses: the topology is a
121
presentation of Freud’s theorisation of Spaltung and the return itself func-

tions as a topological circuit, a re-turn. The re-turn brings with it the
subject’s double-looped topology as a conceptual progression while itself
being an example of this topology as a return that delivers a “transformed
sense.” Here, the Möbian topology is not just a product of reading but is
the very structure of reading. With the “here, as elsewhere” that serves as
an example of a return that has amounted to nothing more than a “regres-
sion,” Lacan is referring to neo-Freudian readings of ‘Verneinung’ that
have taken instances of negation in the clinic as evidence of resistance on
the part of the analysand—a response which then requires an analysis of
resistance. In an exemplary instance of negation outlined by Freud, an
analysand, without prompting from the analyst, states that, whatever else
his dream might concern, it certainly has nothing to do with his mother.80
In the analysis of resistance, this would be read as a defensive stance that
the analysand is to be browbeaten into dropping. One can easily see how
such a practice could quickly devolve into a specular rivalry, a clash of
egos that would ensure analysis remained fixed at on the imaginary plane.
Where Freud had, in what Lacan repeatedly refers to as a “turning
point” in his thought during the 1920’s,81 begun to conceptualise the
elusiveness of the unconscious—the worrying revelation that, via opera-
tions such as negation, it closes itself off—his disciples argued that for
this new development to be countered, a shift from the analysis of repeti-
tion’s material to an analysis of resistances would have to be enacted. If it
is the unconscious that is to be analysed and not the ego, one must grasp
that “[o]n the unconscious side of things, there is no resistance, there is
only a tendency to repeat.”82 Repetition, as the insistence of signifiers,
produces material for analysis. Freud’s twist—the “turning point” that
would see him, upon completion of the circuit, arrive not at ego psychol-
ogy but at (Ich-)spaltung—had, instead of remaining bound within the
“fastened character” of his progress from and toward the divided subject,
been fallaciously grasped as licensing a violent “swerving in its entirety of
a field of observation”; the “great turning, the agonizing revision” which
sees the “reintegration of psychoanalysis into the categories of general
psychology.”83 The originality of repetition had been folded back into the
study of consciousness.
How, then, does Verneinung lead us to the split? Analysts had not, unlike
Freud (according to Lacan’s re-turn), been good enough Hegelians. They
had “overlook[ed] the consequences of what Freud says about Verneinung
as a form of avowal” and failed to acknowledge that “negation by the sub-
ject cannot be treated as equivalent to drawing a blank.”84 There is, Lacan
contends, no pure vocalised negation; disavowal is not tidily distinct
from avowal. The statement “not my mother” demonstrates this perfectly.
Before seeing how, it’s worth observing that Lacan’s appraisal of
Hyppolite’s Hegelian reading of Verneinung and his own contributions,
are, in the context of our discussion, very telling. Lacan’s two interven-
tions, the first of which opens with reference to “my method of returning
to Freud’s texts,”85 “still bear traces of the violent novelty they brought
with them” and thus warrant returning to, not least because “the subjects
they deal with have yet to be taken up by others.”86 We might also argue
that the early seminar sessions from which these écrits are taken amount
to a localisable point of departure for Lacan’s own circuit. A significant
tribute is reserved for Hyppolite who has, in a fashion that recalls both
Freud and Lacan’s own Möbian circuits, by “allowing himself to be led
in this way by the letter of Freud’s work, up to the spark that it neces-
sitates, without selecting a destination in advance—and by not backing
away from the residue, found anew at the end, of its enigmatic point of
departure”87: Spaltung.
It is precisely these two facets of Lacan’s re-turn—the proposition that
the split is fundamental and caused by the signifier—that Hyppolite’s
reading demonstrates. The status of an articulated negation is particularly
awkward; it cannot be read as the defensive response of a unified con-
sciousness because it brings something into existence precisely by stress-
ing its non-existence. In other words, a far more efficient and effective
barring of the signifier “mother” would have been to not say it at all.
Instead, “mother,” in being raised as a denial (“not my mother”), is now
a positivised negative; a “nothing” or “not” that counts as something.
It is not simply “equivalent to drawing a blank” and nor is it to be
made equivalent, through hasty understanding, to an avowal (“it is my
mother”). The subject has both said too much and failed to say it all.
Negation, then, should not be apprehended as an act within the imagi-
nary theatre of defence and aggressivity but should be read as a logical
123
equivocation that does not obey the law of non-contradiction. Alenka

Zupančič illustrates this strange “negativity introduced or discovered by
psychoanalysis”—that “is not pure absence or pure nothing, or simply
the complementary of what it negates”—with a brilliant example from
Ernest Lubitsch’s Ninotchka.88 A customer, upon ordering coffee without
cream, is informed by the waiter that, since the restaurant is out of cream,
they can only offer coffee without milk. The disavowal (“without milk”
or “not mother”) is thereby lent an existential weight that distinguishes it
from ‘pure’ negativity.
Zupaničič discerns a vital distinction between the unconscious as
manifested in the dream’s content—an error that leads the analyst down
the hopeless cul-de-sac of seeking to learn whether or not the object
(“mother”) really appeared in the dream—and the unconscious as effective
in the dream’s re-counting, the distortion in the content’s re-presentation.
As Lacan points out, the objection made to Freud that one cannot ever
be absolutely sure what exactly occurred in the analysand’s dream “lacks
validity. For it is precisely on the material of the narration itself—the
manner in which the dream is recounted—that Freud worked.”89 Rather
than attempting to reveal an unambiguous presentation, the analyst
identifies the unconscious at work in the failure of re-presentation—the
impossibility of producing faultless and exhaustive meaning (i.e. both
saying it and saying it all). The shift of the ‘place’ of the unconscious
from content to content’s distortion means that even if the analysand
were to be persuaded by an interpretation that retrieved the object, even
if the analysand were to retract the censorship and say “yes, you’re quite
right, I really was dreaming about my mother,” this would not defini-
tively resolve the primary structural split that has generated a particular
distortion (the split between “mother” and “not mother”). In the Möbian
structure of language we have passed from disavowal to avowal, from “not
mother”/S to “mother”/S′ (the reversal of orientation), before re-turning
to what Zupaničič calls the undecidable “not-mother”90—a distortion
that is irreducible to both “mother” and “not mother.” The unconscious,
rather than being an object (i.e. mother), instead ex-sists as the twist
that, without giving itself, warps the subject’s speech and prevents the
sort of univocal meaning effect that Saussure’s bilateral strip/sign would
produce. The ‘place’ of the unconscious is not the dream’s content, the
original presentation or the localisable ‘point’ of departure that a naive

interpretation would seek to return to, but the twist itself, the distortive
effects of which are discernable in re-presentation.
This is what Lacan is getting at when he states that the truth can only
ever be “half-said” and that, because it is always incomplete, it has the
structure of fiction. Either way it is received (i.e. as manifest disavowal
or latent avowal), the statement “not mother,” is always “half-said.” If
Lacan’s repetition “tell[s] the truth about Freud,”91 this is only insofar as,
examining the relation between Freud’s thought and the real, he abuts
upon the mainspring of truth’s failure and thereby holds onto the real:
What Freud brings us concerning the Other is this: there is no Other except
in saying it [i.e. no unified, totalised Other qua One that is beyond the logic
of re-presentation], but it is impossible to say completely. There is an
Urverdrängt, an irreducible unconscious, the saying of which is not only
defined as impossible, but introduces as such the category of the impossible.92
***
In Seminar XI, Lacan—following a passage in which he refers to the
unconscious as a “gap” that neo-Freudians have attempted to “stitch
up”—reasserts the stakes of his second circuit as a re-turn that requires
him to “go back and trace the concept of the unconscious through the
various stages of the process through which Freud elaborated it—since
we can complete that process only by carrying it to its limits.”93 A few
sessions later we are left in no doubt as to what this limit is: “The subject
in himself, the recalling of his biography, all this goes only to a certain
limit, which is known as the real.”94 We should be careful about how we
think about this real: there is a difference between the impossibility of
saying it all and the impossible to say. The former poses a limit that is
endlessly deferrable, the subject’s recollection of his biography will always
find new material and associations, while the latter presents an actual
limit that the analysand’s constructions negatively circumscribe through
an equivocation, avoidance or silence. It is just such a method that Lacan
and Hyppolite exercise in their reading of ‘Verneinung’, arriving at a limit
which is the unconscious “defined as impossible.” Instead of attempt-
ing to subsume this limit, one should, Lacan seems to suggest, adopt an
125
intellectual stance with respect to this “gap” akin to the “surprise” of the
subject who “feels himself overcome”95 by the unexpected eruption of
unconscious distortion. The analyst, for whom Picasso’s maxim “I do not
seek, I find” obtains a practical pertinence far beyond the convenience
of a slogan, offers an approving nod toward “the astonishment by which
[Hyppolite] entered into the proceedings.”96 Freud’s texts, writes Lacan,
“have surprised me and those who attend my seminars as only genuine
discoveries can.”97 The unconscious, and Freud’s discovery of it, never stops
being unprecedented. Again stressing that the unconscious is not a pre-
served archive of repressed content awaiting the illuminatory evacuation
of distortion to which any “search for meaning” or “return to sources”
aspires, Lacan asserts that “[i]n the spoken or written sentence something
stumbles … What occurs, what is produced, in this gap, is presented
as the discovery”98—the Freudian discovery; the Spaltung from which he
departs and to which he re-turns and rediscovers. Topologically, the gap is
the void between the above-beneath crossing that is written by the inte-
rior eight’s failed self-intersection (which is the effect of the twist). This
line is what is left by the reduction of the Möbius strip’s single edge but
it is itself also the edge of a Möbian void (see Fig. 2.3).
When one discovers the unconscious, one is not discovering an endur-
ing, unchanging and constant entity—be it a material organ-source to
which biology reduces the psyche or an exhumed archaeological artefact.
The discovery will always demand rediscovery: “as soon as [the discovery
of the unconscious] is presented, this discovery becomes a rediscovery and,
furthermore, it is always ready to steal away again, thus establishing the
dimension of loss.”99 The unconscious is discovered as that which refuses to
give itself. These (re)discoveries do not amount to the systematic accumula-
tion of information through samples and examples which might eventually
provide a complete picture. Lacan humorously parodies this fallacy:
The analyst who listens is able to record many things. With what your aver-
age person today can state … one can compile the equivalent of a small
encyclopaedia … Afterward one could even construct a little electronic
machine… And this is moreover the idea that some people can have—they
construct an electronic machine so that the analyst only has to pull out a
ticket that will give them their answer.100
Despite the patent ludicrousness of such an idea, it re-emerges later in the

very same seminar, threatening to domesticate Lacan’s own (re-)discover-
ies, which, transferred from the clinic to the university, finally come to rest
in a socialite’s drawing room: “What will you do with all I tell you? You
record it on a little machine, and afterward, you have parties which you
hand out invitations to—that’s a Lacan tape for you.”101 Contrary to this
grim banalisation, if psychoanalytic discovery constantly requires redis-
covery, each rediscovery is, to invert the formula, always a discovery; it is
always novel and unforeseeable; perpetually alien to predictive knowledge.
The subject’s “surprise” and Hyppolite’s “astonishment” alert us to an
important equivalence between the unconscious and Freud’s text, which
Lacan rediscovers and reads through a second circuit that is not, we recall,
a simple “reduplication.” Describing his re-turn as a “literal commentary
on Freud’s work,” Lacan contends that “[t]here is nothing superstitious in
my privileging the letter of Freud’s work. It is in circles where liberties are
taken with that letter that people render that letter sacred in a way that
is altogether compatible with its debasement to routinized use.”102 What
are we to make of Lacan’s suggestive reference to “the letter of Freud’s
work” beyond an implied philological devotion to scripture, which, if it
shows the wrong kind of devotion, debases the letter by receiving it not as
sacrilegious but as sacred? There functions an intriguing interplay of faith
and heresy in this discipline without disciples: if one is to be faithful to
Freud—to do justice to Freud—one must recognise in his discovery not
an endlessly reproducible commandment (a legacy of sens) but an origi-
nal heresy (distortion): Fiat trou… Freud’s disciples are heretics precisely
because they “stitch up the gap,” turning the double-loop of the interior
eight into a reducible circle and transforming the discovery into a rou-
tine (from resistance to egoic rehabilitation). Liberties are taken precisely
when none are taken. The re-turn’s second circuit is not only necessitated
by the first; it is necessitated by that which necessitated the first: “not
backing away from the residue, found anew at the end, of its enigmatic
point of departure.”
***
So far in our account of Lacan’s re-turn to Freud we have restricted
ourselves to an insubstantial yet irreducible line without points, learn-
ing how this topology is both a presentation of Lacan’s method and a
127
presentation of the theoretical developments that result from a hodos taken

up meta (both after and with) Freud. How might Lacan’s invention—the
extra-discursive object a—emerge from this topology of repetition?
3.3 T
he Lacanian Invention and the Millerian
Reinvention
Much has been made of the compliment extended by Lacan to
Miller—that “[h]e who interrogates me also knows how to read me”103—
in a prefatory statement appended to the transcript of their 1973 tele-
vised interview. Lacan’s depiction of Miller’s response to his teaching is
worth noting, especially when we take into account the derision Lacan
reserves for the orthodox reception of Freud, which had, instead of pay-
ing attention to “the gap that opens up in his thought,” “engage[d] in the
morose operation of obstructing it”104: “For the first time, and particularly
with you [Miller], I felt I was being listened to by ears that were other
than morose: namely, ears that didn’t hear me Otherizing [Autrifias] the
One.”105 Moroseness, we are told a few paragraphs earlier, is an affective
response to Spaltung and the failure of the subject to find a “dwelling-
room” in language that is to his “taste”106—a space that is both tailored to
the demands of the individual One and is itself a One, a unified room of
one’s own that confronts the invasive barred Other with a wall. This is not
the One that Lacan talks about: the “original Un” of the cut or the “one
of the split”107 cannot be ‘Otherized’; it cannot be explained and cured
by a totalised Other of the Other that would itself be a universal and
unified One. This frustrates the narcissistic idealism of the neurotic who
“wants to be the One in the field of the Other”108—a field that is itself a
“topological structure … which means that the Other is not complete, is
not identifiable in any case to a One.”109
Closely aligned to the morose attitude is “sadness [tristesse]” which
Lacan rather unusually refers to as a “moral failing.”110 He is alluding here
to the crippling guilt experienced by the subject with respect to the obscure
nexus of castration, prohibition, original sin and loss that Freud sought
to narrativise with myth and which is so integral to Christian doctrine. It
is, of course, this nexus (of language and jouissance) that constitutes the
unconscious. Opposed to the “moral weakness” of a puritanical sadness

or self-regarding moroseness, whereby one rejects the scandalous jouis-
sant unconscious and protects oneself from sin, is the “virtue” of a “gay
sçavoir” that revels in the savoir produced when the unconscious speaks
(ça parle). However, even the virtue of this Gay Science “cannot but meet
in” this bitty jouissance “the Fall, the return into sin”111 by ultimately
learning that the jouissance accessible to a subject that dwells in language
cannot be enough to return him to a state of prelapsarian Oneness.
Nevertheless, this virtue remains a considerable improvement on sad-
ness and one that Lacan himself exemplifies: “Everyone knows that I am
cheerful [gai], even childlike, so they say: I amuse myself. In my texts, I
am constantly indulging in jokes that are not to the taste of academics.
This is true. I am not sad [triste].”112 To dismiss Freud’s Jokes and Their
Relation to the Unconscious as mere frivolity is to morosely obstruct the
gap of unconscious distortion, whereas the cheerful attitude of gay sçavoir
consists in “not understanding” or “diving at the meaning [sens]” but
instead “flying over it as low as possible without meaning’s gumming up
this virtue, thus enjoying [jouir] the deciphering.”113 This has less to do
with an enjoyment that the analysand or analyst might derive from the
analytic session and more to do with a reading practice that detects the
analysand’s particular mode of jouissance in the Witz of the unconscious.
If, for Lacan, a principle of psychoanalytic reading is that the subject’s
half-said “truth must be followed to the letter”114—if, in other words,
psychoanalytic reading addresses the signifier in its detachment from any
effet de signifié—we owe this practical foundation to “Freud’s discovery”
which reveals what the “truth … of the unconscious owes to the letter
of language” regardless how “sacred or profane” this literality is. A disci-
plined approach to the letter does not treat it as a symbolism or message
conveying a transcendent Truth; its truth is entirely bound up with the
literal and distorted rebus itself.
Further on in ‘Television’, Lacan reproduces one of his own jokes:
“Who, upon reading … Seminar XI, does not sense the advantage of not
translating Trieb by instinct, of keeping close to this drive by calling it
drift [dérive], of dismantling and then reassembling its oddity, sticking, all
the while to Freud?”115 As noted in Chap. 1, Lacan’s translation of Trieb
as “drift” was emblematic of his approach to a Freudian legacy that was
129
manifesting itself in the uncritical, drone-like following of an instinc-

tual direction (sens) laid down by the Other. There was also an impor-
tant theoretical point to be made: he calls it drift because the drive is
not straightforwardly directed at its aim. The satisfaction attained by the
drive is that of a detour that leads it to circle the object a without actually
achieving this aim by directly meeting it. This is because “Trieb … has a
relationship to das Ding”116 insofar as the unattainable object that it loops
around is a representative of the Other’s desire/lack.
The logic of the Möbian re-turn as the navigation of a twist within a
closed circuit wherein Lacan departs from and returns to Freud is clearly
operative in his “dismantling” and “reassembling” drive as drift, which,
unlike instinct, takes account of the drive’s inherent “oddity”; the fact
that its (re-)turning circuit has no ‘natural’ object, no ideal starting point
to which it might return or teleological end-game: like Lacan himself, it
merely “fait le tour.”117 This absence of a final biological determinant of
human behaviour recurs as conceivably the most fundamental Lacanian
theorem: the non-existence of the sexual relationship. This real impossi-
bility gives rise to an “annoyance [ennui] [or] moroseness”; a response that
consists in a delusional “‘divine’ approach to love”118 (a union with the
enveloping sphere of a loving God), a “oneyance [unien]. By which I des-
ignate the identification of the Other with the One.”119 Again, morose-
ness entails suturing a particular gap from which the subject suffers; here,
the impossibility of unifying subject and Other is unsuccessfully miti-
gated by the “gumming up” of Spaltung with an imaginary fiction.
In reference to what he dismisses as the facile “sexo-leftism” of per-
missive modernity, Lacan critically observes that these same “affects [i.e.
annoyance and moroseness] are betrayed—through speech, and even
in deed—in those young people dedicated to relations without repres-
sion.”120 These relations without repression or censorship—relations
in which one would have no need to say “not mother”—cannot exist
because the impossibility of communicating and satisfying desire is
structural not occasional. Lacan, speaking in the wake of the student
unrest ideologically propelled by a Maoism that seduced many of his
own students, including Miller, and perhaps with Deleuze and Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus in mind, laconically remarks that “[n]o amount of excite-
ment” or synthetic liberalism “can lift away the evidence of a curse on
sex.”121 The classicism of an ideal “divine” love and non-traditional forms

of free love are, as far as Lacan is concerned, no different. Attempts to
enjoy “without repression”—to challenge the patriarchal/Oedipal model
of the family and articulate your heart’s desire—are doomed to failure
since they are merely attacks on a particular manifestation of a structural
impossibility, an incurable real. “Even if memories of familial suppres-
sion weren’t true,” Lacan continues, “they would have to be invented,
and that is certainly done.”122 Parochial barriers to an absolute jouissance
(a prelapsarian union anterior to the “original Un”) will still be erected,
even by the subject who has thrown off the shackles of the nuclear family
and entered a commune, since episodic and meaningful impotence is far
less threatening than an acknowledgement of the impossible. Prohibition
is a form of defence: “Sexuality, as it is lived, as it operates, is … some-
thing which represents a prohibiting oneself [un se defendre] from follow-
ing the consequences of this truth that there is no Other.”123 When Lacan
states that the sexual relationship does not exist he is not suggesting that
sexuality is not “lived” or that it does not “operate” in various instances
but that the subject can never become One in the arms of a totalised
Other. It is through an inherent property of language (or phallic signifi-
cation)—the slippage from signifier to signifier—that castration (or the
phallic function) operates and the sexual relationship is made impossible.
Desire cannot be perfectly communicated and thus the satisfaction we
receive—which Lacan named phallic jouissance—is always inadequate.
However, despite being structurally heterogeneous to the signifier,
the object that would complete both subject and Other is not simply
absent. Lacan will once again turn to topology to present this paradoxical
relation. At the beginning of the fifth session of Seminar XIX he wrote the
following aphorism on the board:
I demand that you refuse what I am offering you because: it is not that.
[Je te demande/ de me refuser/ ce que je t’offre/ parce que: c’est pas ça.]124
On first glance this statement appears to be little more than a playful

reiteration of a familiar theme: the satisfaction of desire is impossible, the
purpose of the analyst (present in this aphorism as “I”) is not to annul the
subject’s lack in the fashion promised by today’s quasi-spiritual self-help
131
books, “that [ça]”—the extra-discursive object-cause of desire that would

bring the divided subject ontological oneness—is impossible to attain,
et cetera. Whatever the subject does manage to ask for and receive is
always “not that.” The aphorism twice relays between “I” and “you” before
abruptly concluding that nothing final and definitive can come of the
communion between two desirous subjects. Lacan seems to encourage
this interpretation when he refers his audience to Wittgenstein’s famous
aphorism (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”), com-
menting that “it is very precisely … what one cannot speak about that
is at stake [when I say] … it is not that.”125 However, rather than align-
ing himself with Wittgenstein’s asceticism, Lacan makes a quite different
claim about the function of his own aphorism: far from being just another
pithy précis of the human condition, it instead does something. It will not
articulate that about which one cannot speak; it will instead present it.
This “formulation,” he would later reflect in Seminar XX, “is carefully
designed to have an effect”126—an effect that goes beyond the production
of meaning, an effect that exceeds the sum of the aphorism’s constituent
parts: “What I am leading you to is the following. Not to know … how
meaning arises, but how it is from a knot of meaning that the object
arises, the object itself.”127 While the aphorism can certainly be said to
mean something (as, for example, a flamboyant theoretical statement on
the impossibility of desire’s satisfaction), it also somehow makes present
that which cannot be spoken about. But how exactly does that which
cannot be verbalised “arise” from a knot of verbs?
The object, having fallen from the relation between subject and Other,
is now said to have arisen from the relation between signifiers. In the
cross-cap the disc has a certain “nullibiquity”: while it is eccentric to the
Möbius strip, it is present along the entirety of its edge. “We are con-
fronted with it [the object] at every instance of our existence”128—that is
to say, we are confronted with it as absent. If it were simply non-existent
or beyond language it wouldn’t bother us; instead, it ex-sists as that
which is missed by language. Lacan is not suggesting that his aphorism
has achieved the impossible by seizing the out-of-line point in language
but that it shows how the object arises as a loss that is the consequence
of language. The signifier is central to the constitution of the object as
that which falls.
Lacan fiddles about with several flat diagrams in order to show the par-
adoxical space that the object occupies—an object that is neither defini-
tively excluded from the signifying chain nor assimilated into it. While
these figures show the object dropping out of the aphorism’s matrix of
verbs and pronouns they do not, however, sufficiently testify to the para-
doxical way in which the object is both the structural ground of Lacan’s
aphorism—it quite literally being this aphorism’s object, the ‘something’
that this aphorism is about, the motivation for Lacan to demand that
we refuse what he is offering—and, through its absence, the structural
hole.129 Lacan patiently demonstrates how, if we assume the object’s abso-
lute absence or non-existence, the three-verbed construction collapses
because it becomes under-motivated and nonsensical. With the “it is not
that” removed, there would be no reason for Lacan to demand that you
refuse what he is offering. Furthermore, if the negatively denoted object
is the necessary support of this construction, the latter is also the neces-
sary support of the former: if we lose any one of the verbs, “that” becomes
completely non-existent because the construction supporting it collapses
(e.g. what would it mean for Lacan to demand that you refuse if he had
not made an offer?). The object does not pre-exist the statement; it is not
simply the thing or spirit that the letter kills. It is instead, as missed, an
effect of the knotting of verbs just as these same verbs derive their mean-
ing effect from this object since it is what “justifies a demand such as to
refuse what I am offering you.”130 In its ex-sistence the object is extimate
to the combination of verbs.
The failure of various diagrams to adequately present the structural
‘place’ of an object that is neither completely excluded nor an assimi-
lated part of the chain, forms an apposite prelude to the introduction
of a topological structure that will dominate Lacan’s later seminars: the
Borromean knot—a structure in which the knotting of three compo-
nents and the creation of a central hole necessarily occur simultaneously.
If we extract a ring/verb the structure falls apart and the object fails to
arise. Furthermore, we can see that the object is outside each of the rings
but is supported by their configuration. It ex-sists (Fig. 3.1).
This is another instance of Lacan’s topologerie assisting his linguisterie,
another “way of topologizing language’s status.” Where the Möbius strip
allowed him to show how meaning (as the union of signifier and signi-
fied) is endlessly deferred, the knot allowed him “[n]ot to [show] … how
133
demand
a
offer refuse
Fig. 3.1 The Borromean knot of demand/refuse/offer
meaning arises, but how … the object arises.” Topology was therefore
integral not only to the rediscovery of Spaltung but also to the invention
of the object.
***
We have seen how Lacan argued against the “morose operation of
obstructing” the “gap” in both Freud’s thought and the subject itself by
presenting his re-turn in terms of a reading of repetition and distortion,
but have yet to address what is at stake in Lacan’s contention that in Miller
he had a reader not given to moroseness. While what has been produced
by some of Lacan’s readers, such as Slavoj Žižek and Derrida, has gar-
nered considerable critical attention, comparatively little has been written
about Miller’s approach and what there is is politicised and quite one-
dimensional. Bearing this, and Lacan’s insistence that Miller “knows how
to read” him, in mind, it is worth scrutinising the stakes of Miller’s reading
through a cluster of papers presented in the early 1980s—the moment at
which Lacan’s legacy was most fiercely contested following dissolution.
In ‘Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm’ (1981), Miller,
echoing both Derrida’s and Lacan’s musings on the novelty of an encore,
comments that
it is hard to focus on your own place, your own novelty within psychoanalysis.
The question is whether we Lacanians are condemned to repeat Lacan’s
discourse or not. And, if we wish not to repeat it, how can we invent? There
is one way of inventing and that is delusion … [T]here is a delusional
component in knowledge. The only question is … whether that delusion
of knowledge can be used by others.131
Perhaps mindful of a statement Lacan made at Caracas in 1980 (“It is

up to you to be Lacanians if you wish, for my part, I’m a Freudian”132),
Miller is clearly wary of explicitly posing a ‘Millerian’ invention. Any
reflection on the particularity of his own “novelty within psychoanalysis”
must first be submitted to a framing presupposition; his inclusion in a
wider grouping—“we Lacanians.” This title both legitimises and confines
output; apparently condemning it to the status of a disciple’s faithful
reduplication of an unquestionable precedent. Miller’s conception of rep-
etition appears to differ from the conception that we have established. In
the above passage, repetition is equivalent to reduplication and routinisa-
tion while invention comes closer to how Lacan regards repetition. But
why does Miller group together invention, knowledge and delusion?
To answer this question we will need to make a chronological leap
to a paper presented in 1995. In the appropriately titled ‘The Invention
of Delusion’ Miller examines the utility of delusion as the “invention
of knowledge”133 in the structure of psychosis. Unlike the neurotic, the
psychotic fails to attain entry into the symbolic because the Name-of-the-
Father is foreclosed. The paternal metaphor and, consequently, phallic
signification fail to function. What is foreclosed in the symbolic returns
in the real: the psychotic is harangued and harassed by ‘elementary
phenomena’—signifiers (S1) that emerge from the real and are cut off
from the associative connection with other signifiers (S2) that would lend
them meaning. He can, however, find some provisional stability in patch-
ing up the hole in the Other left by foreclosure with an invented delu-
sion (S2). Observing that, for Lacan, the matheme S2 designates both the
network or ensemble of signifiers and knowledge (as that which is con-
stituted by chains of signifiers), Miller generalises delusion, stating that
“all knowledge is delusion” and that the difference between neurotic and
psychotic subjects is that whereas for the neurotic delusion (as the place-
ment of S1 in combination with S2) “emerges so naturally,”—indeed, this
combinatorial is the very foundation of his structure/subjectivity—the
psychotic must put in “an enormous amount of work”134 to construct and
maintain his delusional knowledge. Rather than considering it a madness
as such, Lacan presents delusion as a secondary interpretation of a struc-
tural fault that produces “signifiers-in-isolation.” Seizing on this, Miller
135
declares that “[w]e translate therefore what the role of the signifier has
in interpretation”: “the meaning happens as a result of the delusion” and
“the delusion is equivalent to the S2.”135 According to Miller’s analogy
in the above block quotation, “Lacan’s discourse” is something like an
S1 with respect to which the reader must invent his own interpretation/
delusion. What has been Miller’s delusion? Is it possible to interpret with-
out inventing what Lacan calls an “interpretation delusion”?136
In a paper titled ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ Miller refers back to ‘The
Invention of Delusion’ and outlines a mode of interpretation that would
not be delusional. Before seeing how, let us note that in the latter paper
Miller had introduced the “operator of perplexity” that functions between
“the signifier of the elementary phenomenon” and meaning:
We invent this special operator, the operator of perplexity, and point out
that it is the normal situation of human beings to come under the effect of
the signifier, in as much as all subjects have decipher a signifier. This is
consistent with Lacan’s theory, which indicates that the structure reveals
itself in psychosis and that we have to take into account the veil of the
neurotic … [I]t is axiomatic that the elementary phenomenon makes evi-
dent our relationship with the signifier.137
Miller is not suggesting with his “invention” that psychosis and neurosis
are ultimately equivalent but that the structure of psychotic delusion—
which, it is important to note, is only one form of suppletion open to the
psychotic—lays bare (“reveals”) the structure/link (S1↔S2) that occurs
so “naturally” for the neurotic subject (as that which one signifier repre-
sents for another signifier). In neurosis this link is veiled because the S1,
rather than emerging from the real having been foreclosed, is repressed,
leaving the neurotic access only to S2. The psychotic is confronted with
the enigmatic S1 in a way that the neurotic is not. The neurotic’s uncon-
scious formations—as instantiations of unconscious knowledge (savoir)—
are interpretations of the primally repressed elementary phenomenon.
As Lacan puts it, unconscious “[d]esire,” which both induces and evades
the diachronic unfolding of the signifying chain, “is interpretation
itself ”138 insofar as it hungrily accrues signifiers that, in re-presenting the
elementary phenomenon, “veil” it.
In ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ Miller argues that an interpretation that

mimics the unconscious by adding new signifiers and associations to the
analysand’s speech, by searching for meaning rather than finding non-
meaning, will be ineffective and interminable:
The elementary phenomenon is a particularly pure demonstration of the

presence of the signifier all alone, in sufferance—waiting for the other sig-
nifier that would give it a meaning—and as a rule [that is, in the normality
of neurosis] the binary signifier of knowledge appears there, which in the
event does not conceal its delusional nature. It has a perfectly good name:
the delusion of interpretation. This is the way of all interpretation: interpre-
tation has the structure of delusion … [T]he other way consists in withhold-
ing S2, in not bringing it in—so as to circumscribe S1. It amounts to
bringing the subject back to his truly elementary signifiers, on which he
has, in his neurosis, had a delusion … The reverse of interpretation consists
in circumscribing the [nonsensical] signifier as the elementary phenome-
non of the subject, and as it was before it was articulated in the formation
of the unconscious that gives it the sense of a delusion.139
Not only must the analyst “withhold” S2 by, on occasion, greeting the
analysand’s constructions with silence or by terminating the session at
a suitable point (i.e. after the analysand has said something notable and
before the couch becomes a platform for the trivial and aimless prolifera-
tion of S2) in order to isolate and fix a signifying combination in which the
link between S1 and S2 is at its least veiled, he should also cut S1 from S2
by reading the letter—the signifier in its materiality and not its relation-
ality, the signifier extracted from the chain (S2) that generates meaning
effects. We introduced the topology of this non-delusional interpretation
in Chap. 2: the incessant slippage of the lines without points is arrested
not by a transcendental signifier but by a cut that separates signifier from
signifier, reversing and disarticulating the neurotic’s delusion.
We might recycle Lacan’s description of Freud’s Möbian course and
note “the fastened, closed, completed character, even though marked by a
twist,” of a line that is neither straight nor circular and which re-turns to an
“original point” “with the sense”—or, better, non-sense—“accumulated
in the course of a long exploration.” Lacan departed from, and returned
to, psychosis; presenting Aimee in his medical dissertation (1932) and
137
Joyce in his twenty-third seminar (1975–1976). The reason why this was
not a simple return is that whereas Aimee was a paranoid psychotic—
vitally, “paranoiac knowledge”140 is a delusional scaffold that desperately
organises (that is, makes sense of ) a threatening, invasive Other that has
not been pushed away by the signifying difference that constitutes the
neurotic—Joyce, through his art, engineered a non-delusional suppletion
of the hole in the Other. In its most exaggerated expression (Finnegans
Wake) this suppletion is a “buzzing swarm” of S1s, a throng of signifiers
detached from metaphoric and metonymic formations and rearranged
according to their materiality. Here, Miller’s “operator of perplexity” runs
rampant as the neurotic reader is confronted with a barrage of elemen-
tary phenomena. Picking up on Lacan’s suggestion that analysts read
Finnegans Wake, Miller observes that the work “is not itself an interpreta-
tion, and it wonderfully brings the subject of reading back to perplexity as
the elementary phenomenon of the subject in lalangue. Let’s say that in
the text, S1 always absorbs S2.”141 The (structure of ) lalangue that is veiled
by the neurotic text is laid bare by the Joycean text.
Just as Lacan emphasises Freud’s re-turn to Spaltung, Miller emphasises
Lacan’s re-turn to psychosis, arguing that Lacanians should “use psycho-
sis as reference, to think neurosis from psychosis.”142 As we noted at the
opening of this discussion, Miller’s suggestion that “Lacan’s discourse”
forces the reader to respond with an invention grants the Lacanian text
the function and place of S1. Miller is more explicit in ‘The Invention
of Delusion’, stating that “Lacan invites us to be a bit more psychotic,
a bit more perplexed … He helps us with his style that produces per-
plexity. He teaches us not to close off the moment of perplexity and
not to rush out with our S2 … [N]ot translating in this way is kind of a
foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.”143 Integral to the formation of
the Lacanian reader—the Lacanian qua reader, the analyst who does not
append S2 to unconscious formations—is a psychotic experience. Was
this not what Lacan was attempting to induce when, in 1980, he dis-
solved the École freudienne de Paris—unravelling the interpretation-delu-
sions (sens) incubated by the institution—and told his followers that “the
Other is missing”? Was this not why, in Caracas, Lacan grumbled that
raising pupils “doesn’t always give such great results” and expressed his
curiosity about what inventions he “might get from” his Latin American
“readers”144—subjects for whom Lacan’s texts emerged like enigmatic

signifiers from the real and not pre-digested (that is, veiled in S2) by an
instructor. Ever since Lacan foreclosed himself, inventions have prolifer-
ated. Miller’s particular interpretation-delusion has been the formalisa-
tion of an interpretative method that would not itself be delusional, a
reading that would not morosely identify the Other with the One.
Lacan’s suggestion that in reading Finnegans Wake “one can sense the
presence of the jouissance of he that wrote it”145 introduces us to another
significant facet of the Millerian reading—the importance attributed
to the extra-linguistic concepts that Lacan developed in the 1960s and
1970s as part of a general shift in attention to the real. This reading’s
genesis holds a privileged place within the chronology of Lacanianism. It
began with a paper—pointedly titled ‘Another Lacan’—of an “inaugural
nature,”146 presented in Caracas in 1980, at the very same conference in
which Lacan gave his final public seminar. Miller’s invention owed its nov-
elty to the “amendment” that it proposed to what was then the “standard,
received reading”147 of Lacan which, from the theory of the unconscious
as structured like a language, produced a wild extrapolation, according
to which Lacanian interpretation is concerned only with the signifier and
not affect (jouissance). Despite Miller’s insistence that a “Return to Lacan”
that would “imitate Lacan in his relationship to Freud” being “not at all
the slogan under which I imagined I was doing this course,” he invites
such associations by comparing the reading that reduces Lacan’s teaching
to the signifier with the reading that reduced Freud’s teaching to the sec-
ond topography148—a drawing that Lacan held partly responsible for the
advent of ego psychology (see Fig. 4.1). Of course, it was at Caracas that
Lacan stated that his own debate with Freud could be summarised by the
difference between his topology and Freud’s topography.
The caricature of the Lacanian analyst as a post-structuralist quack, inef-
fectively pratting about with puns and etymological obscurities, called for
a firm rebuttal. If clinical practice is to have an impact, it cannot devolve
into an interminable wallow in the delights of “idealinguistery.” To devote
one’s attention, under the auspices of the “‘influence’ of Lacan,” solely to
the signifier is a “distortion,” akin to the ego psychology performed under
the auspices of the influence of Freud (his legacy of sens), which leads to
a “stagnation of theory,” condemning practice to the invention of delu-
139
sion (S1→S2); an endlessly exploitable “play of signifiers”149 in combina-

tion with other signifiers that fails to approach the subject’s elementary
phenomena (S1). Hence the necessity of interpretation in reverse: it is only
in reading the subject’s elementary phenomena that the analyst can “sense
the presence” of the subject’s particular mode of jouissance.
In fantasy—the neurotic’s interpretation-delusion which organises and
distributes his jouissance—“Φ,” the symbolic phallus or phallic signifier,
“is also incarnated in S1”150 and, as we have seen in our examination of the
cross-cap, is central to the constitution of the neurotic’s object-cause of
desire. As Miller notes, Lacan considered the extra-discursive object a, and
not the signifier, to be his invention. The latter, Lacan argued, was already
present in Freud’s work. It is therefore no surprise to find Miller, in his
most comprehensive report on the concept of jouissance in Lacan’s work,
declaring that his “task now consists in reinstating invention.”151 Lacanians
had, like the ego psychologists, remained stuck on a single circuit—that
is, Lacan’s repetition of Freud’s circuit which rediscovered the unconscious
structured like a language—and had failed to take proper account of the
invention that had arisen from Lacan’s double circuit. It is fitting to once
again recycle Lacan’s presentation of the topology of his method: Miller
found that he had “to make the same circuit a second time, but in such a
structure, doing it a second time has absolutely not the sense of a pure and
simple reduplication.” Miller’s reinvention consisted in calling attention
to Lacan’s invention (itself only accessible in the clinic through a non-
delusional interpretation), in making it clear that the logic of fantasy was
not secondary or reducible to the logic of the signifier.
According to Miller, Lacan’s “advance” with respect to Freud, is, fol-
lowing a re-discovery of the “unconscious structured like a language
[which] realizes essentially the first Freudian discovery,” to ask what
“treatment” can be “deduc[ed] from the unconscious structured like a
language?”152 What treatment can be offered when unconscious desire
cannot be articulated—or, to put it another way, when desire can only be
articulated? Miller’s reading of a Lacan beyond the signifier—a reading
of what Lacan discovers beyond Freud’s discovery—leads us to fantasy,
as that which stages the relation between the neurotic’s thought and the
real. It was in approaching this real—the real of sexuality, the impos-
sibility of uniting subject and Other in the sexual relationship—that
Freud confronted an impasse. Lacan’s treatment—the disarticulation of
fantasy which sees the subject freed from the suffering that his attach-
ment to a particular object can cause (e.g. recurring self-destructive life
choices)—does not amount to ensuring that the sexual relationship is
eventually realised; rather, that which does not stop not writing itself,
having been encountered as an incurable impossibility by the subject,
now no longer gives rise to a debilitating misery that does not stop writ-
ing itself. Miller’s reading of the relation between Lacan’s thought and
the real (itself a reading of the relation between Freud’s thought and the
real), his insistence that a reading of Lacan’s thought that restricts itself
to the theory of unconscious thought (as structured like a language) and
ignores his non-signifying concepts (jouissance, object a, etc.) can only
lead to a clinic of interpretation-delusions, constitutes “a re-launching
of a fundamental difficulty which is not Lacan’s difficulty, but which is
what I think of as the difficulty of psychoanalysis. What he revives in
this way is the same thing as psychoanalysis itself.”153
This is perhaps a depiction of Miller’s reading that diverges with a
more prevalent narrative—most forcefully propagated by Élisabeth
Roudinesco—which holds that a “Millerian” hijacking of Lacanianism
effected a whole-sale sterilisation of an unruly, seething mass of creativ-
ity: “Lacan’s gradually evolved concepts, detached from their history and
stripped of the ambivalence that had been their strength, were now clas-
sified, labeled, tidied up, sanitized, and above all cleansed of their poly-
semic complexity.”154 Miller stands accused of distorting distortion itself
by morosely stitching up gaps in the Lacanian rebus. Is there a Lacan
before the Fall? At what point did this ideal Lacanianism qua ideal obscu-
rity become obscured by Miller’s influence? Scott Wilson—in a cultural
analysis of jouissance, no less—follows this dubious line of argumentation
even more trenchantly by explicitly posing a divide between a “hyper-
rationalist Millerian Lacanianism and the Lacanianism of Lacan him-
self.”155 In such formulations, the pure “Lacanianism of Lacan himself ”
starts to resemble the Kantian thing-in-itself; no longer is “Lacan’s dis-
course” merely elementary phenomena, letters detached from knowledge,
but instead becomes a sacred well of untouchable noumena to which no
classification or re-presentation is adequate.
For his part, Miller considers “this conflict over the matheme” to be
“completely secondary” to the “difficulty which launches itself again and
141
again in Lacan’s teaching” and which Miller’s reading aims to “exploit”

with a view to making “it worth something in the practice of psycho-
analysis.”156 Lacan developed his mathemes and topologerie not in order
to distract from or resolve this difficulty but in order to better “hold on to
the real.” If the reader can forgive such clumsy and vertiginous formula-
tions, there appears to have been a Roudinescoian misrepresentation of
the Millerian renewal of the difficulties in the Lacanian renewal of the
difficulties in Freud. Reading Lacan reading Freud has thus identified a
difficulty but the question remains: how can this difficulty be effectively
tackled? How does a practice informed and supported by topology and
mathemes succeed where the play of signifiers does not?
Explaining his decision to place various mathemes and apho-
risms alongside Lacan’s “polysemic complexity” in ‘Television’, Miller
argues—in a fashion that recalls Lacan’s reading of the Entwurf as the “sub-
structure of Freud’s thought”—that his marginalia were designed to show
that “every rhetorical flourish is in fact built upon a structure, and that his
playing with language corresponds to lines of reasoning.”157 Rather than
instinctively recoiling from this brusque formalism, we should ask how
it is that an unlikely marriage of lalangue and rigour allows one to bet-
ter read the unconscious, to read the fundamental relationship between
thought and the real—the latter being the “fundamental difficulty” of
the fundamental non-relationship. This requires a formalisation of the
real effect of the signifier (the “one of the split”) that does not neglect the
affect caused (the “pathos of the cut”158) or morosely “Otherize the One.”
Structure is not synonymous with systematic coherence.
3.4 T
he Topology of Revolutions
and Systems
Before further examining Lacan’s writing of the Freudian impasse, let us
take a brief detour to explore Lacan’s quarrel with a particular metaphor
that Freud employed to characterise the psychoanalytic subversion and
further outline the opposition between the “real-of-the-structure”—that
is, structure both defeated and defined by an impossibility—and any
devolved sense of structure as consistent and coherent good form.
As is well known, Freud proudly regarded his discovery as constitut-

ing a further Copernican revolution that once again ousted man from
his comfortable position at the centre of things. The ego, like the earth,
suffered an ignoble demotion. Part of the reason for Lacan’s disinclina-
tion toward Freud’s metaphor lies in “our epoch’s devolved sense for the
word: revolution. One could mark its passage to a superegoistic function
in politics, to the role of an ideal.”159 For Lacan, “the idea that knowledge
can make a whole is … immanent to the political as such” insofar as ide-
als such as the Hobbesian body politic, with its constituent parts united,
are macro projections of the ideal ego, derived from the “imaginary idea
of the whole that is given by the body, as drawing on the good form
of satisfaction, on what, ultimately, forms a sphere.”160 Even revolution
itself, as an apparent disruption of good form, becomes a superegois-
tic master-signifier to which all individual concerns are either peaceably
nullified by the collective will or reductively dialectised, in a resurgence
of Mirror Stage aggressivity, as counter-revolutionary. Either way, utopic
or bloody, the projected synthesis—itself, of course, impossible—makes
political action a “metaphysics … [that] occup[ies] itself with plugging
up the hole of politics”161 or the hole in the Other. Revolution does not
constitute an unprecedented invention—an injection of disorder into
the order of things—it is instead compelled by a synthesising impulse:
the creation of a unified society by jettisoning the perceived obstacle; the
bourgeoisie, the Establishment, the Jew, et cetera.
Revolution, Lacan avers, ultimately entails “a return to the master.”162
In this historical wheel, one ruling faction is usurped by another, which
then requires years of Terror euphemistically dressed as consolidation, so
that the structure is left unaltered by a change in appearance. Lacan is
alluding here to his formalisation of the social link in terms of four dis-
courses, each of which hold in place four essential elements of structure,
with this particular placement and the relation it produces determining
the nature of the discourse itself (Fig. 3.2).
Given that it poses the constitutive combinatorial of the barred sub-
ject, the master’s discourse enjoys a certain foundational priority. A sub-
ject fades beneath a signifier (S1) that represents him for another signifier
(S2) and is in an impotent relation with the jouissance that falls from
this combination. A change in discourses is formalised by a quarter turn
so that the master’s discourse becomes the hysteric’s discourse when the
143
master
S1 S2
S a
S2 a agent Other S S1
university hysteric
S1 S truth product a S2
a S
S2 S1
analyst
= impossible relationship
= impotent relationship
Fig. 3.2 The four discourses (See: SXVII, p. 29. SXX, pp. 16–17. ‘Radiophonie’,
p. 30. Autres écrits, p. 447)
barred subject ascends to the position of agent and the master-signifier

occupies the position of the Other that the agent addresses. It is in this
particular turn that we can locate the origins of psychoanalysis: the hys-
teric questions the master (S1), forcing him to produce a knowledge (S2)
that is ultimately impotent in the face of the enigmatic truth of the hys-
teric’s jouissance (a).
If there are four positions and four discourses, in the event of a full 3600
turn, or revolution, the status quo is reasserted: “The master’s discourse
accomplishes its own revolution in the other sense of doing a complete
circle.”163 Perhaps the most pertinent example of the “retrogressive” result
that can succeed an “attempt at transgression,” is that of the neo-Freudian
autonomous ego: “For a return to the master’s discourse,” Lacan avers,
“one could do no better.”164 Having previously been put in the position
of agent, the barred subject is once again occluded by a master signifier
which, in this instance, is the analyst’s ego. Spaltung is elided by a return
and re-emerges through a re-turn. Furthermore, throughout Seminar
XVII the point is made that the subject accesses jouissance not through
transgression—a specious return to an ideal, original state achieved by
crashing through the impasse of castration—but through repetition; a
series of re-turns that always miss the absolute jouissance of das Ding.
For discursive structure to emerge, a link between an agent and the

Other is required. However, each discourse is afflicted by an axiomatic
impossibility (top row); that of making agent and Other unite in faultless
conformity (the sexual relationship), which in turn results in impotence;
the inability of the compensatory product of the misfiring relationship
to agree with or cure the agent’s truth (bottom row). Impotence masks a
more vital structural impossibility; the former is regarded as the primary
obstacle to final satisfaction (e.g. without the bourgeoisie we would have
the perfect society) that allows one to ignore the real, structural obstacle
(e.g. the perfect society does not exist). The inevitable failure of each dis-
course to attain ideal closure drives structural adjustments; the discourses
“turn … not by being progressive” but because if they don’t, they will
“grind away, there where things raise questions.”165
For example, the surplus jouissance (a) that the master’s discourse
yields is ineffectual in resolving the master’s truth (castration: S-barred).
No matter how much financial or political capital is accumulated, no
matter how productive the slave’s labour is, the master can never “‘empire’
over the universe”166 by forcing the Other to align with and reflect his self
and thereby negate the primordial Spaltung that characterises the human
condition. Whatever the master does manage to attain, it is always the case
that “it is not that.” The master’s ideal is that of a society that functions in
his own mistaken self-image: “the mirroring” between world and subject,
upon which imaginary delusions of mastery repose, is “what allowed for
the chain of beings that presupposed in one being, the Supreme Being,
the good of all beings”167; a universalised “good sens” or “good form” that
reigned in the Germany of 1933168: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.
In ‘L’étourdit’ Lacan explicitly associates the master’s discourse with
the sphere:
Naturally there are saids [dits] that form the object of predicative logic and
whose universalizing supposition belongs simply to the sphere, I say: the, I
say: sphere, in other words: that precisely structure finds in it only a supple-
ment which is that of the fiction of the true.
One could say that the sphere is what does without topology. The cut, to
be sure, here cuts out (by closing on itself ) the concept on which there is
based the language-fair, the principle of exchange, of value, of universal
145
concession. (Let us say that it is only ‘matter’ for the dialectic, the business
of the master discourse.) It is very difficult to support this pure dit-mension,
from the fact that being everywhere, it is never pure, but what is important
is that it is not the structure. It is the surface-fiction with which the struc-
ture is clothed.169
A predicate is the portion of a proposal that informs us about the pro-

posal’s subject. We can precede a subject and predicate with a universal
quantifier and say that “all men are mortal.” Any “universalizing sup-
position” implies a bounded container that defines its occupants (“I say:
sphere” not asphere) and is sure of its subject; assuming a definite article
rather than an indefinite one (“I say: the,” not a). For example, Lacan
frequently pointed out that the unconscious is structured like a language,
not the language, emphasising that psychoanalysis is always concerned
with a particular unconscious rather than with any universal or collec-
tive unconscious. The master’s discourse makes a sphere of the Other:
a master-signifier (S1) comes to dominate and define the totality of the
signifiers (S2) that comprise the Other. The master’s diktat applies for all;
his good is the “good of all beings.” The master derives a surplus jouis-
sance (a) as the product of his rule (S1→S2). Topologically, this surplus
jouissance is a circular disc which can “supplement” the Möbian structure
of the subject and, in doing so, grant his fantasy a fictive consistency and
coherence. This is “the fiction of the true,” the truth that has the structure
of fiction because it conceals the real lack in the Other. However, in the
master’s discourse, Spaltung—the asphericity of the sphere—is denied.
Unlike the asphere, the sphere does not have a Möbian portion and any
cut made to its surface will close itself in a single turn and will always and
only produce a supplement—this supplement being the object a or sur-
plus jouissance upon which the capitalist market reposes. This “pure dit-
mension”—literally, the dimension of what is said (dit)—of the capitalist
master’s sphere which devotes itself to the supplement and completely
neglects the subject is impossible to maintain: while the dimension
implied by what the master says is the sphere and the dimension cre-
ated by what the master says is the circular disc, the discursive rapport
between S1 (agent) and S2 (Other) will always break down, revealing a gap
between the two. This gap, which is closed by the circular cut (i.e. an S1
and S2 that mirror each other), is figured by the failed self-intersection of

an interior eight cut from which the master’s disavowed truth (S-barred)
emerges and the fundamental asphericity of his spherical “surface-fiction”
becomes apparent.
***
Contra Freud, Lacan argued that the psychoanalytic subversion finds
an antecedent not in the Copernican revolution but in the discoveries of
Johannes Kepler. Lacan had two reasons, both of which concerned the
antinomy between the structure of the subject and good form:
(1) Copernicus had simply switched the occupier of centrality, substitut-

ing the earth for the sun, and thus the very principle of centrality
remained unchallenged: “the figure of the sun is … worthy of imaging
the master-signifier [of centrality] that remains unchanged in the
measure itself of its concealment.”170 In the fundamental structure of
Copernicus’ cosmology, the master had returned. Lacan’s critique is
aimed not at a particular centre but at centrality as such.
(2) When this centre is presumed, the orbit of any planetary body
“engenders the circle (that is; the perfect form).”171 The result is an
imaginary cosmology, written in accordance with the symbolisms
and ideals that support the ego.
According to Kepler, a planet’s orbit is an ellipse which, unlike a circle,

is polycentric: it has two focal points. The total of the distances between
these focal points and any point on the ellipse is always constant. There
is a scale of what is termed ‘eccentricity’: the greater the distance between
these two ‘centres,’ the more exaggerated the deformation of good form,
the more eccentric an ellipse is said to be. A circle would have zero
eccentricity.
The subject is decentred, split between two signifiers or foci. For Lacan,
the point was not that the unconscious should replace the ego at the cen-
tre or even that the subject is split between these two foci; instead, the
subject of the unconscious is constituted by the split that makes the good
form of a circular and self-identical “ontotautology” impossible. It is in a
bungled re-presentation of himself that the subject (dis)appears and the
unconscious speaks.
147
We might also compare what Lacan refers to in Seminar XII as “cos-

mological thinking”172—namely the idealised space of a correspondence
between microcosm (i.e. the soul or ego) and macrocosm (i.e. the cos-
mos) that takes the form of enveloped-enveloping spheres—with what
he calls in Seminar IX the “acosmic function” of “human desire.” The
latter is in an “orienting, attracting, relationship”173 with an extimate cen-
tre; the “acosmic point of desire”174 which exerts its gravitational pull as
the cause of desire by belonging (and not belonging) to both the sub-
ject and the Other. Like the asphere, the psychoanalytic acosmos is both
a negation of the imaginary cosmos and a structure that organises and
is organised by the object a. It is unlikely to have escaped Lacan that
ellipse is derived from the Greek elleipsis (ἔλλειψις) meaning to lack or
fall short. The metonymic signifying combination cannot close itself in a
circular unity that would be reducible to a point—an action that would
annul the hole that the Möbian structure of language creates as it turns:
“To put it elliptically: it is precisely because desire is articulated that it is
not articulable.”175 One of an ellipse’s focal points is the sun; in the other
focal point we find only a vacuum. This is a convenient analogy for the
dual function of the object: it is both a lure; a dazzling “agalma” that
stops up the hole cut by the signifier and grants fantasy its consistency,
and a void; a representative of the lack in the Other.
With the Keplerian acosmos—a structure defined by emptiness and
bad form—Lacan finds a scientific precedent that is far more closely
aligned with the Freudian discovery and his own asphere than the
Copernican delusion: “the Copernican revolution makes a metaphor
appropriated beyond what Freud comments on, and this is why from
having returned it to him, I take it up again.”176 However, Lacan was
not concerned with finding in the history of science a superior metaphor
but instead focussed on the moment at which modern science jettisoned
metaphorical meaning altogether. Accordingly, Newton’s discovery that
the planets fall rather than turn “only takes on the weight of subversion
when it leads” to a written equation. The Newtonian écrit “rips us away
from the imaginary function … of revolution.”177 We are no longer in
the domains of symbolism or the image, which invite the lapse into the
illusory avatars of good form (sphericity, circularity and centrality), and
are instead faced with the letter: formulae that “one does not imagine”
and which “make an assembly with the real”178 without, strictly speaking,
meaning anything. Like topology, the equation is not a metaphor of struc-

ture: it is structure. The letter is not a more refined representation of
the celestial thing-in-itself, it instead replaces this thing. The theoretical
physicist can arrive at laws and consequences by working with equations
and formulae long before these same results are finally verified by empiri-
cal experimentation.
The topology and mathemes were attempts to provide the Freudian
subversion with Newtonian booster shots; it is in these attempts that,
far from ruinously diverting psychoanalysis from its inaugural purpose,
return psychoanalysis to what Lacan considered to be its historical condi-
tion of possibility; the birth of modern science:
It remains to be recorded that the mathematician has the same embarrass-

ment with his language as we have with the unconscious, and expresses it
by this thought that he does not know what he is speaking about, even to
assure it as being true (Russell).
Being the language that is most suitable for scientific discourse, mathe-
matics is the science without consciousness that our friend Rabelais prom-
ised, before which a philosopher can only remain dumb: gay science rejoiced
by presuming of it the ruin of the soul. Naturally, neurosis survives it.179
Bertrand Russell famously commented that “mathematics may be defined

as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor
whether what we are saying is true.”180 This is because the mathema-
tician’s letters—which comprise “the language that is most suitable for
scientific discourse,” the language divested of imaginary signification and
symbolism—replace the “what” that they might be “about,” becoming
in themselves the “what” with their own laws of functioning. Moreover,
since this is not a matter of adequating one’s representation of reality
with this reality (or “what”), it is not necessary or often even possible that
the mathematician’s language be verifiable (true). This is the mathemati-
cian’s “embarrassment” which he shares with the analyst insofar as the
latter cannot (and, indeed, should not try to) tell if what the unconscious
produces is true—for example, did the analysand dream of his mother?
The analyst reads the letter, not the reality that this letter supposedly
represents or obscures. Mathematical language is “the science without
149
consciousness” because it detaches the signifier from conscious intention

and the signified. Letters work autonomously; their combinations are
determined by laws internal to the mathematical system. The utter irrel-
evance of consciousness and truth to the modern mathematised science
confounds the philosopher and “ruin[s] the soul.” What is left once the
pre-modern soul has been ruined by the “gay”—that is, non-morose—
“science” that tears the signifier from signified and egoic intention to
produce a knowledge that is not dependent upon a consciousness or observa-
tion and compromises the eternal good form of the starry vault? Lacan’s
answer is the neurotic subject of the unconscious; a subject plagued by a
knowledge without consciousness and the barred Other.
In Seminar XX Lacan stated that “scientific discourse was grounded in
the Galilean turning point”181 and that he owes this insight to the work
of Alexandre Koyré—a highly distinguished historian of science. Note
that he does not refer to a Galilean revolution: only a quarter turn is
required to pass from master to hysteric, whose discourse is the discourse
of science insofar as both put the ruined soul (S-barred) in the place of
the agent, knowledge in the place of the product and the cause of their
epistemological desire (a) in the place of their truth that neither wish to
investigate. Koyré writes that Galileo’s first law of motion, the law of iner-
tia—according to which a force is required to modify or halt a body’s per-
petual motion or disrupt its eternal stillness—was an “attempt to explain
the real by the impossible.”182 The uninterrupted uniform motion that
Galileo describes is impossible—nowhere will an example of this motion
make itself available to conscious intuition—and yet it forms the basis of
his account of the real, the foundation of its laws. Koyré adds that bodies
moving in a straight line in a vacuum can only be “mathematical bod-
ies moving in mathematical space.”183 In other words, these bodies and
space cannot be found in reality and can only be written with letters. The
association of the real with the impossible, the founding of a structural
organisation on something that does not “give itself ” and the assertion
that this real can only be presented by mathematical language clearly
influenced Lacan’s concept of the real. It is through the “formalisation of
discourse … [that] we encounter an element of impossibility. This is what
is at the base, the root, of an effect of structure.”184 In each discourse the
real is figured by the impossibility of the agent and the Other uniting. In
formalising this real as an effect of structure, Lacan was providing an early
version of his logic of sexuation—itself an attempt to explain the real not
through myth but by the impossible.
***
Given the scepticism with which Lacan regarded the comparison Freud
drew between himself and Copernicus, we can well understand why it
would not have thrilled Lacan to happen upon Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
and Jean-Luc Nancy’s “circular diagram”185 in The Title of the Letter, the
composition of which was designed to demonstrate the classicism of
Lacan’s thought as a totalising cosmology which they pointedly named
“‘System’ of ‘The Instance of the Letter,’ or De revolutionibus orbium litter-
alium”186 after Copernicus’ tract; De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The
authors contend that the good form of their “flawless and remainderless
circle”187—which places Lacan’s influences (Hegel, Heidegger, Saussure,
etc.) on an outer circle, and various Lacanian concepts and operators on
an inner circle (letter, Other, subject, etc.)—is an accurate reflection of
Lacan’s “system.” The construction of the latter has, they claim, consisted
of a series of “concentric terms”188 orbiting a central principle: the bar
between signifier and signified which causes the subject to emerge as
barred from the metonymy of the signifying chain. Like the Copernican
revolution, Lacan’s decentring of the subject has not dissolved central-
ity altogether; it has instead replaced one centre with another. The same
goes for Lacan’s text (‘The Instance of the Letter’) which, despite its many
diversions, is characterised by “a turning movement” at the end of which
“something installs, accomplishes, and encloses itself with all the charac-
teristics of systematicity.”189 This is the topology of a return, not a re-turn.
The authors reflect that “it appeared necessary to us to reconstitute a
certain philosophical discourse as one of the geological strata of Lacan’s
discourse, and as one of the branches of its genealogy.”190 These untopolog-
ical metaphors seem strangely at odds with the sophistication of the proj-
ect that they represent. Posed alongside the revelation of a hidden source
(“geological strata”) that recalls the depth psychology of Freud’s archaeo-
logical digs is the conventional, unidirectional arborescence (genealogical
“branches”) of which Deleuze and Guattari were so critical.191 Such is
151
the uninspired and generic character of these interpretative clichés, it is

hard not to avoid the conclusion that the authors were being deliberately
provocative—the intimation being that if Lacan required such a reading
it is precisely because his “system” is either a cartographic tree, a layered
accumulation of influences or a Copernican cosmos which all begin from
a philosophical origin/centre. The almost total absence of the real from
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s study—a study that unifies the hole of the
symbolic with the circular consistency of the imaginary under the banner
of “system”—is conspicuous to say the least. It makes a single appearance
in a footnote in which the authors mention that any consideration of
“the Lacanian theory of the real … would entail commenting on other
texts”192 and thus falls beyond the remit of their close reading. They are
not above doing so, however, provided it suits their effort to establish
Lacan’s disavowed debt to philosophy—an effort that takes the form of
a conventional interpretation, a dissolution of ambiguity: “it is possible
and necessary to clarify what is implicit in [‘The Instance of the Letter’]
with regard to Hegel by referring to some of Lacan’s other texts…”.193
In ‘L’étourdit’, following a discussion of the phallic function (operative
as the bar between signifier and signified), Lacan does acknowledge that
“[i]t is obvious that in ‘expressing myself thus’ as will be translated what
I have just been saying, I am sliding towards a ‘world view.’”194 Is this
bar the unusual foundation of a classical Weltanschauung? The function
is not itself expressed and nor does it act as the basis for a universalis-
ing expression or conception: it is instead both expression’s condition of
possibility and impossibility; turning every Weltanschauung into a half-
said truth that holds to the real. With the quotation marks (“‘expressing
myself thus’”), Lacan opens up a gap within his own discourse by taking a
distance from himself. This is the effect that the phallic function has: one
cannot, in an expression, achieve a self-presence or centring that would
negate Spaltung. The bar is precisely that which renders any centre or the
single turn of a “remainderless circle” impossible. If the bar is, as Lacoue-
Labarthe and Nancy argue, “foundational and originary,”195 its function
lies in the operation of repetition as the foundation.
The authors also describe Lacan’s project as a “rigorous repetition of
negative theology” and an “ontology that opens onto—and is founded
(that is, closed) on—a gaping hole … whose outline can be discerned.”196
Neither the closure nor the hole that structure’s double-looped edge demar-
cates are conventional. In the topology of the cross-cap (S-barred<>a)
the hole is a “hole-point,” both something and nothing, that, since it
is attached to the Möbian subject’s single edge, is nullibiquitous, both
everywhere and nowhere. “[W]hat we have to present,” Lacan argues, is
the “system of nowhere [nulle parte]” that can account for both the signi-
fier and jouissance. Referring again to a structural paradox articulated in
Chap. 1, just as the fact that the subject’s real escapes us cannot escape
us, the “nowhere” at stake is jouissance as a nullibiquity—an ubiquitous
absence, a nowhere that is felt everywhere. If accession to subjectivity
(via castration) means that “jouissance is excluded [and] the circle is
closed,” this “exclusion of jouissance is only stated from the system itself.”
It is as excluded that jouissance is experienced. In other words, the fact that
the ideal Oneness of absolute jouissance does not stop not writing itself
does not stop writing itself. By means of an analysis of the subject’s “rela-
tion to jouissance … insofar as it is excluded,” one finds that jouissance
“has become everywhere again” because it is precisely through exclusion
that “it is realised.”197 If, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy contend, the
hole is closed, this closure only organises an extimacy which folds the
revolutionibus orbium litteralium into itself.
It was topology’s dynamic materialisation of nullibiquity that allowed
Lacan to break with the last vestiges of philosophical discourse that
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy detected in ‘Instance of the Letter.’ The sub-
ject’s ‘existence’ is not derived solely from an egoic illusion (imaginary
consistence) or an “archaic” hole (symbolic insistence) but from a topologi-
cal ex-sistence (real). This ex-sistence is a nullibiquitous, Möbian twist that
makes the similarly nullibiquitous “hole-point” of the asphere that its
double-looped edge organises irreducible: “topology converges with our
own experience … [because] it never resorts to any substance, never refers
to any being, and breaks with everything smacking of philosophy.”198
Antinomic to the stability of being, whether this is straightforwardly pos-
itive or negative, the topological subject is an irregular spatio-temporal
dynamic qualitatively defined by an ineradicable real.
While the concern raised by Tim Dean is certainly valid—that a “prob-
lem with topological formalisations of subjectivity is that they’re cognate
with the impulse to systematise psychoanalytic theory”—it is impor-
tant to note that Lacan’s topological structuralism does not produce a
153
classical system in the sense of a complete organisation that plugs the

gap. Dean suggests that the problem is partially mitigated by Lacan’s
“haphazard” “use of topology” which “make[s] it that much harder for
us to systematise his thinking.” This appeal to the unwitting virtue of a
nobly ignorant layman, hamstrung by a “rudimentary grasp of advanced
mathematics,” is an attractive defence of Lacan’s topologerie.199 However,
at the very same moment that it rescues topology through an appeal to
imprecision, this appeal completely negates topology, the functional pur-
pose of which lies in its structural and immutable precision—a precision
that is primary to the slapdash liberty (i.e. continuous deformation) that
it appears to license. This precision pertains to fundamental relationships
that are r elevant not to the mathematician but to the psychoanalyst and,
as we have seen, they constitute what we might call (following Lacan’s
references to an acosmos and the asphere) an asystem.
Steven M. Rosen recognises in Lacan’s efforts to “demonstrate ‘pre-
cisely’ the inescapable imprecision of language” with a topology such
as that of the Möbius strip an extended period of intellectually unten-
able “self-deception” throughout which he attempted to balance both a
recourse to the “positivity of mathematics” with an antinomic, “nega-
tive, post-structuralist side,” leaving his work wracked by an irresolv-
able “ambiguity” to which “he [chose] to blind himself.”200 Following
this damning charge, Rosen traces a lineage of “post-Lacanian topology”
manifested in the work of figures such as Deleuze and Guattari, whose
mantra—“Subtract the unique from the multiplicity”—is realised in an
anarchic “topology of multiplicities” abandoned to constant flux, contin-
uous transformation and a permanent state of “becoming.”201 We must
recall, however, that it is the fact that topology is “not condemned to
total liberty”—that it somehow entertains one form of liberty or impre-
cision (quantity) within a precise limit or irreducibility (quality)—that
makes it an appropriate support for psychoanalysis. There is more to the
Lacanian subject than the indistinct drift of signifiers. Lacan topolo-
gised not just the post-structuralist relation between signifiers, he also
topologised the relation between the subject and the fixity of an irreduc-
ible real. With the asphere’s envelope structure Lacan navigated his own
path between the post-structuralist aversion to systematicity (indefinite
extension) and the closure of an imaginary cosmos.
3.5 From Myth to Structure

Having read Miller reading Lacan reading Freud, we have re-turned to
an original difficulty. As Lacan puts it in one of his final seminars: “[T]
here is no sexual relationship. It is the foundation of psychoanalysis.”202 To
arrive at this conclusion-cum-origin Lacan would have to repeat himself,
to return anew to old pronouncements. Thus we learn in 1957 that “the
great secret of psychoanalysis” is that “there is no Other of the Other”203
and are informed a decade later that “the great secret of psychoanalysis is
that there is no sexual act.”204 Lacan’s re-turn here acquires a further vital
purpose: to read in Freud—in the various “memories of familial suppres-
sion” that populate his myths and cases—the impossible:
[My teaching] is without precedent, other than that of Freud himself. And
precisely insofar as it defines the previous one in such a way that one must read
its structure in its impossibilities.
Can one say … Freud formulated this impossibility of the sexual rela-
tionship? Not as such. I am doing it … it is written everywhere. It is writ-
ten in what Freud wrote. It only has to be read. Only, you are going to see
later why you cannot read it. I am trying to say it … [and] say why I for my
part do read it.205
Lacan’s re-turn will be characterised not only by a method of reading—

a reading that passes from myth to structure and on to the topological
“real-of-the-structure”—but also by a re-writing that will present, rather
than cure, the fundamental difficulty. How can structure be read in its
impossibilities? How does structure function in Freud? How will reading
Freudian structure allow Lacan to break new ground?
***
“[M]yth,” argues Lacan, “is the attempt to give an epic form to what is
operative through the structure.”206 The import of this contention becomes
clearer when aligned with the observation that the father in, for example,
Freud’s Totem and Taboo, fulfils the function of a “structural operator.”207
The structurally necessary operation at stake is castration presented in
myth’s epic form as an internalised prohibition. In myth, a structural
real—the impossibility of saying it all or enjoying all the women—is
155
imposed by a particular and actual figure who bears language’s blame.

Furthermore, as the perceived agent of castration, the tyrannical father
of Freud’s myth is an exception to castration, an aspirational horizon
beyond the law. He has realised an absolute jouissance of the sexual rela-
tionship that is out of, and without, bounds. In its avoidance of the “real-
of-the-structure,” in its referral of the responsibility for the sexual impasse
from the signifier to the father (or some other obstacle), the mythic dit-
mension presents a mi-dit truth: “The sexual impasse exudes the fictions
that rationalize the impossible within which it originates. I don’t say
they are imagined; like Freud, I read in them the invitation of a real that
underwrites them.”208 That which has the structure of fiction—as any
articulation in language does—is to be read for its impossibilities.
Through an exhaustive collation of myths followed by a reduction of
their narratives to a relational combination and the discovery that the
purpose of myth was to stage and resolve a contradiction that troubled
civilization’s discontents, Claude Lévi-Strauss had convincingly demon-
strated the affinity that mythic reasoning has with scientific reasoning.
Lacan, however, was not entirely convinced about this apparent unity of
purpose; instead he contended that whereas logic can rigorously delimit
the real (as an impasse), myth always partially obscures the real, dif-
fusing and dispersing it through a number of contingent narrativised
particularities, turning a structural operator into an identifiable obstacle,
turning structural impossibility into occasional impotence. While myths
“operate according to laws of transformation that are precise,” they
nevertheless remain “short on logic.”209 If the analyst is concerned not
simply with a continuous “genealogy of desire”—whether this desire be
systematised as internal to a particular case history or placed alongside
other cases in accordance with diagnostic typology (i.e. mythic arche-
types)—but with “how [desire] is caused,” he requires “a more complex
combinatorial than that of myth.”210 In the topological imbroglio of
subject, Other and object there is an extimate limit to the purely sym-
bolic narrative, a real which infinitely complicates the space and time of
the genealogical combinatorial.
We have seen the awkward complexity of the structural combinatorial
with which Lacan’s psychoanalytic “science of the real”211—these topo-
logical demonstrations of irresolvable paradoxes and logical formalisa-
tions of impossibility—is concerned. When “our mathematics enriches
this [mythic] combinatorial,” psychoanalysis finds “better things to do

than to devote itself to interpreting these myths in a style which does not
go beyond [the] ordinary commentary”212 of reconstruals that only add
S2 to what is already a bloated neurotic delusion. We move, then, from
the Freudian mytheme to the Lacanian matheme. To paraphrase Lacan’s
contention regarding Newton’s formula, psychoanalysis takes on the
weight of subversion when it leads to the écrit which reduces the imagi-
nary signification of myth’s epic form; a formalisation through which “we
encounter an element of impossibility.” There are, then, two distinct oper-
ations at stake in Lacan’s re-turn: first, the ellipsis of “repetition thinking”
is re-discovered and, second, the real which metonymic, metaphoric and
mythic meanings repeatedly miss is rigorously formalised in the famous
logic of sexuation as the impossible. This is supplemented by an inven-
tion; the object a as the extimate junction in the topological combinato-
rial of subject and Other.
In the “Freudian myth” there is posed “an equivalence between the
dead father and jouissance.”213 The original, castrating master-father was
himself an exception to castration; he enjoyed all the women, a privilege
that led to his murder by his deprived sons who, following this act, were
afflicted by a guilt that effectively instituted prohibition. Freud’s myth
illegitimately posits a space of unfettered jouissance free from “familial
suppression” and before the Law. Freud’s myth of the tyrannical master
who is not subject to castration is to be read as “the sign of an impossibil-
ity.”214 Distortion will not be replaced with the truth or meaning; instead,
distortion’s half-said truths will be read and reduced to the point that the
impossibility that induces them is circumscribed. There was, Lacan con-
tends, an effort by Freud, discernible in the myths to which he constantly
referred and the treatment of cases that these same myths influenced,
to back away from and to disavow castration’s universality by rescuing
the father. The truth of the master’s discourse (castration/S-barred) was
placed under an obscuring veil. Rediscovering this Spaltung and formalis-
ing the real qua impossible that ensues, Lacan refuses to “routinize” the
unprecedented “letter of Freud’s work.” The myth is read as a “neurotic
product” designed to resolve “[Freud’s] own impasses” and restore the
Other: “It is to the testimony that the obsessional contributes about his
structure, to the aspect of the sexual relationship that proves to be impos-
sible to formulate in discourse, that we owe the myth of Freud.”215
157
There is no “real father as agent of castration” (the real father here

being the impossible uncastrated tyrant or an actualised obstacle); instead,
castration should be considered as “a real operation that is introduced
through the incidence of a signifier [S1], no matter which, into the sexual
relation.”216 Spaltung is an insurmountable consequence of speech; even
the “language of the master cannot be anything other than a demand,
a demand that fails.”217 The “permanent downfall of the Other,” the
revelation that the Other is also barred and castrated—the first “great
secret” of psychoanalysis which establishes the second “great secret”
(the sexual relationship’s non-existence)—is, Lacan tells us, “not to be
considered as a happening due to [an occasional] defect” experienced as
impotence in the face of prohibition or circumstance, “but as a fact of
structure.”218 Having been demoted from the role of an unimpeachable
ideal, the father should still less be thought of as the genetic forebear ‘in
reality.’ As Lacan, rather facetiously treating the doctrine of biological
determinism to an amusing reductio ad absurdum, explains; the “only one
real father … is the spermatozoon, and at least up till now, nobody has
ever thought to say that he was the son of this or that spermatozoon.”219
Through the reduction of myth to structure, the re-turn to Freud redis-
covers a fundamental and repeated difficulty: the relationship between
Freud’s thought and the real.
***
Lacan was keen to emphasise, as many have before and after him, that
the psychoanalytic discovery (qua psychoanalytic difficulty) was made
possible by the hysteric’s half-said truths: “The hysterics are the ones who,
as regards what is involved in the sexual relationship, tell the truth. It is
difficult to see how this path of psychoanalysis could have opened up if
we had not had them. This is where we should start from to give its meaning
to the Freudian discovery.”220 We are then—with Lacan, with Freud—as
late as 1971, beginning again; re-turning to the original discovery of the
unconscious to reread Freud.
Lacan’s critical assertion is that Freud was over reliant on the explanatory
clout of the myth of the Oedipus complex in his treatment of Dora, which,
for long periods, amounted to little more than an assault on resistance, a
protracted battle of wills for which the ideal endgame was Dora’s acknowl-
edgment of Herr K. as the object of her desire. Freud never stopped insist-
ing that the curative answer to Dora’s predicament lay in a master-father
who could make her a mother. As Russell Grigg notes, Freud’s unrelenting
faith in the Oedipal myth’s universality as a final referent, an answer for all,
“short-circuits the question of the hysteric’s desire by guiding the hysteric’s
desire in the direction of the father,” thereby lending “consistency to the
figure of the idealized father” and the totalised Other “in the clinical set-
ting”221—the very same ideal that it is the purpose of analysis to dissolve.
Instead of reading desire to the letter, Freud crudely delivers to desire a sig-
nified. Despite the hysteric’s insistence that “it’s not that,” Freud continues
to believe that he can say what that is: “The Oedipus complex plays the
role of knowledge [S2] with a claim to truth.”222 In the hysteric’s discourse
the place of truth is occupied by the cause of desire (a); the extra-symbolic
element that cannot be articulated by the signifying chains that consti-
tute savoir. It is never successfully re-presented by the knowledge that the
master (S1) produces in response to the hysteric’s (S-barred) questioning.
As Lacan put it in his introduction to the German edition of Écrits, the
hysteric’s “identification”—that is to say, the constitution of her symbolic
subjectivity—is established and guaranteed by “structure, and not mean-
ing [sens].”223 The hysteric’s dissatisfaction, the barring of her subjectivity
and the detachment of signifier from signified that makes her metonymic
desire inarticulable, is a “fact of structure” which cannot be plugged by
the imaginary sens of a particular object. If “the desire of the hysteric”
played a vital role in the “original discovery”—not least because listening
to the hysteric’s speech encourages the analyst to make the link between
language, desire and the unconscious—it is unsurprising to witness Lacan
making another “retroactive leap.”224
Lacan’s re-turn has a subversive twist that prevents his second circuit
from simply being a revolution performed by a disciple (the ideal, tau-
tologous return to origins). To this end he returns to a prefatory origin,
observing that The Interpretation of Dreams was shaped by the death of
its author’s father.225 Freud had written that “this book has a … subjec-
tive significance … It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis,
my reaction to my father’s death—that is to say, the most important
event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.”226 What is the signifi-
cance of Freud’s admission? Freud himself regarded dreams of the father’s
159
death as manifestations of a desire on the part of the child to murder

the father and thereby possess the mother. The dream of murdering the
father is a response to his death, a response that affords the subject the
illusion of responsibility and control: “Freud wished to be guilty for his
father’s death.”227 Such dreams are due, Lacan argues, not to a nascent
and universal Oedipus complex but to a neurotic avoidance of the fact
that the father was a castrated master—impotent, mortal and fallible—
long before he died. “S(Ⱥ),” as the matheme of the signifier of the barred
Other, “can mean all sorts of things, up to and including the function of
the death of the father. But at a radical level, at the level of bringing logic
into our experience, S(Ⱥ) is exactly … what is called structure.”228 Note
the difference between “can mean” and “is exactly”: the former implies
only a peripheral and incidental representation; the latter speaks to a
“real-of-the-structure” for which no mythic meaning is adequate.
***
According to the Freudian reading of Oedipus Rex, desire and the law
are opposing forces: desire transgresses the law (qua prohibition of incest)
and the result is a gory comeuppance. This, however, is a reading of sens,
not structure: “one has to begin,” encore, “by expounding [the Oedipus
myth] properly”229 in order to show that “masked beneath the myth of
Oedipus, is that the terms that seem to stand in a relation of antithesis—
desire and law—are but one and the same barrier to bar our access to the
Thing … [D]esiring, I go down the path of the law.”230 The law that pre-
vents access to a forbidden realm of absolute jouissance is not an external
barrier to desire, but is instead written into the very structure of desire
itself. The metonymic movement from signifier to signifier leads only to
the perpetual consolidation of the law.
Re-turning to Freud from “the other side” (l’envers) will entail an appli-
cation of the Möbian method to his myths in order to better account for
the topology of desire’s relationship with the law:
When I say that I re-make the circuit a second time, when I go twice around
the Freudian Möbius strip, you should see in it not at all an illustration but
the very fact of what I mean in the fact that the drama of the Oedipus
complex … has another aspect [face] by means of which one could articu-
late it from one end to the other and make a complete circuit of it.231
Desire and the law occupy the single side of a Möbius strip and in order
to show why this is the case Lacan must accomplish a double circuit
of the tragedy. “The Oedipus myth, at the tragic level at which Freud
appropriates it, clearly shows that the father’s murder is the condition
of jouissance.”232 In other words, the law, embodied by a particular figure,
must be breached for jouissance to be attained. This ‘front’ face of the
Möbius strip “reveals to us the generating drama of the foundation of the
law.” However, with this aspect taken in isolation, a quandary arises: “the
matter remains in suspense … because of the fact that Oedipus … did
not have an Oedipus complex, namely, that he did it in all tranquillity
… he did it without knowing it.”233 Oedipus had gotten away with it: he
briefly lived in an ignorant bliss. The law, because it was a particular and
external impediment made flesh (i.e. Laius), is effectively defeated and
absent—until, that is, Oedipus desires. One must “illuminate the drama
in another way and say that the drama of Oedipus … [is] engendered”
not simply by the (transgression of the) law but “by the fact that Oedipus
is the hero of the desire to know.”234
At the level at which Lacan appropriates the myth, the “tragic main-
spring” is derived not from Freud’s “crude schema”235 (according to
which it is the law/father that blocks jouissance) but from Oedipus’ desire
to masterfully know it all, to ally knowledge with truth, that sees him
ultimately confront and embody this truth as a castrated master. The
father’s murder is only one face of the tragic plot: “Oedipus was admitted
to Jocasta’s side because he had triumphed at a trial of truth.”236 This trial
consists of both the Sphinx’s riddle and a further enigma; the question
that was plaguing Thebes: who killed Laius? The law only becomes evi-
dent or only asserts itself through desire. The law of incest prohibition—
internalised or external and explicit—is strangely missing from much of
the narrative, hurriedly asserting itself at the tragedy’s gruesome conclu-
sion. It is the desire to know, not the law—or, more accurately, desire qua
law—that sees Oedipus arrive at his fate, exemplifying the master’s truth
as a blind, castrated wretch. Lacan’s rereading of the drama demonstrates
how desire and the law, rather than being opposing forces, co-exist in a
Möbian coil:
161
[I]t is just as permissible to translate this tragedy onto this reverse side as to
pose it in front where it reveals to us the generating drama of the founda-
tion of the law. The two things [i.e. desire and the law] are equivalent for
the very reason which ensures that the Möbius strip only really connects up
with itself when two circuits have been made.237
Lacan’s re-turn completes the Freudian/Oedipal Möbius strip by reading

it from l’envers. This method of “repetition thinking” reveals that what
appear to be dichotomous stances (the law’s prohibition and desire’s defi-
ance) emanate from the same locus: the locus (Spaltung) from which Freud
departs and to which Lacan re-turns, having identified both aspects. The
two opposing sides (law and desire) are, once the Möbian circuit has been
completed, revealed to be structurally interdependent. Castration—the
“structural operator” that makes the law and desire equivalent—is “the
end, the conclusion and the sense of the tragedy.”238 This in itself entails a
retroactive circuit through which the tragic hero re-turns to his origin qua
Spaltung and is made man at the hour he ceases to be.
In Lacan’s reading the contingent particularities of mythic narrative,
rather than being treated as a clinical template that will allow the master-
analyst to know (what woman wants), are reduced to a “fact of structure.”
3.6 The Logic of Sexuation

Lacan replaced Freud’s mythic accounts of the accession to sexed subjec-
tivity with the logic of sexuation: an unprecedented logic that accounts
for the two positions—masculine and feminine—open to adoption by a
subject vis-à-vis the phallic function (Φx). We attach to this function a
universal (∀x) or existential (∃x) quantifier. Lacan’s writing is a reduction
of Freud’s: referring ourselves again to Totem and Taboo we can discern
the logic of masculine sexuation at work: ∀x Φx and ∃x ¬Φx. While all
(the sons) are subject to (∀x) the law of castration (Φx), we also learn
that this law nevertheless resides upon an exception: there exists a subject
(∃x) that is not subject to this law (¬Φx). This exception is embodied
by the despotic father who, not being subject to the phallic function,
experiences an impossible mode of totalised jouissance (he enjoys all the

women). He is, quite simply, the exception that proves the law—a nec-
essary beyond that enables the law’s geometric bounds to be defined.
This stubborn belief in an exception to the law (of desire)—a belief that
the sexual relationship exists—is precisely what sustains the wretched
metonymy of phallic signification/jouissance (which, in turn, by being
unsatisfactory, suggests that satisfaction always lays somewhere else). It also
supports a neo-Freudian Oedipal clinic that heaves its analysands along
a path of developmental maturation: through the affective Oedipal laby-
rinth, away from polymorphously perverse partial objects a that occupy
the oral, anal, invocatory and scopic drives, toward the (post-castration)
normalised genital drive—the drive that would end the drift—and, if the
stars align, conjugal bliss. The Oedipus complex serves only to “meta-
phorise” the structural impossibility of the “relation of man and woman”
“in the relations between the child and the mother.”239 It would prove
necessary to formalise this impossibility in logic as a fact of structure, in
order to wrench it away from the stories of occasional imperfections (the
metaphor of prohibition).
Some five years prior to this presentation of his logic, Lacan had
lamented the incapacity of analytic literature “to make anything other,
around this mythical reference [i.e. the Oedipus complex], than an
extraordinarily sterile kind of circular repetition,”240 and went on to
declare that he himself will not attempt to return to an event that had
acquired a certain mythic status within the Lacanian corpus: the aban-
doned seminar titled Names-of-the-Father. “Things taken up at this level
are hopeless”; the analyst has a “much surer way of tracing” “the structure
of all our experience” when he learns that it “has to do with logic.”241
Father—as either a biological entity or a mythic figure that guarantees
the Other from a point of transcendent exception—is replaced by a
“structural operator” (Φ) and its function (Φx). The symbolic phallus (Φ)
is not an organ or an object, but, as the originary signifier without a sig-
nified, instead installs the function (Φx) of the bar between signifier and
signified. It is precisely the phallic function (the fact that no signifier can
signify itself ) that ensures that there is no exception and no Other of the
Other, while a “belief in the father is a typically neurotic symptom”242:
a belief in the Other of the Other, a morose identification of the Other
with the One.
163
As is clear from the number of references to paternal figures in reli-

gious discourse made in the single introductory session of Names-of-the-
Father (a relativisation of the Father is already apparent in the title), the
Name-of-the-Father has in “tradition” taken on the appearance of a fixed
“locus” or a “beach-head.”243 However, when we naively conceive of the
Name-of-the-Father as a topographical contour separating arid terra from
limitless, oceanic jouissance, we misconstrue the topological nullibiquity
of the bar (function). In presenting this space Lacan referred to the Klein
bottle which can be created by taking a cylinder and, rather than joining
its ends to produce a torus, forcing one end of the cylinder to intersect
with the surface and then join the other end. The exterior surface of
one end is seamlessly connected to the interior surface of the other end,
effectively annulling the spatial binary between Innenwelt and Umwelt.
As with the cross-cap, we must once again distinguish between the visible
Klein bottle (where self-intersection appears to occur) and the theoreti-
cal Klein bottle (where there is no self-intersection and an ant walking
along the surface would not be impeded from returning to his point of
departure) (Fig. 3.3).
Placing man on the ‘inside’ and woman on the ‘outside’ (the order
doesn’t actually matter) Lacan states that between the two is a circle, a
“wall … [which] is simply the place of castration.”244 However, any locali-
sation of this circle is an artifice of the imaginary: on the theoretical Klein
Fig. 3.3 The Klein bottle (For Lacan’s representations of the Klein bottle see:
SX, p. 205. SXII, 16/12/64, 6/1/65, 13/1/65, 20/1/65. Je parle aux murs (Paris:
Seuil, 2011), p. 100)
bottle there is no fixed point at which inside becomes outside; they are
continuous: as a fact of structure, “castration is everywhere [partout]”245
and, even more frustratingly, nowhere.
The Father is simply too intimately associated with a number of mis-
apprehensions that it is the task of analysis to dispel. Turning to logic
was, for Lacan, both a renewal of the subversive novelty of psychoanaly-
sis and an assertion of the advance he makes with respect to Freud: “the
Name-of-the-Father is not something I am inventing … it is written in
Freud.”246 The Name-of-the-Father is no longer a Lacanian concept: as an
inherited sens, it was Freud’s fault all along! Even so, the severance is not
absolute. A peculiarity is evident in the way in which Lacan, reflecting
on a previous écrit, wrote in 1972 that “I introduce [j’introduis]”—not
introduced—“the Name-of-the-Father.”247 “Perhaps,” suggests Fierens,
“we can read this form (j’introduis) as the affirmation of an act that he
does not succeed in renouncing even though it has been overtaken by
the advances of his own theorisation: he insists again [encore] and always
on the function of introducing.”248 Lacan’s “repetition thinking” rarely
poses an uncomplicated cut: even at the moment at which Φx was being
presented in its most pared down and unequivocal fashion, the signi-
fier—here demonstrating its potential for an equivocal excess that is
the result of this function—returns to save the father obliquely in an
instance that speaks of Lacan’s debate with his own precedents and with
(paternal) precedence itself. As was made clear in Seminar XXI: Les non-
dupes errent (repetition has generated a homophonic lapsus [Le-Nom-
du-Père]), he did not consider it the role of psychoanalysis to crudely
purge the world of paternal fictions, thereby fostering a new generation
of mature, non-duped subjects, since even these subjects err. The trendy
and self-satisfied cynicism of a generalised atheism with respect to the
father has not automatically engendered a state of post-neurotic enlight-
enment: it is precisely those that believe themselves to be non-dupes—
standing detached from the Other, expressing a knowing amusement at
the deceptions of ideology or the silliness of theology—that are the most
comprehensively duped. Without their own symptomatic attachments
being acknowledged (e.g. the particular mode of jouissance derived from
occupying the place of an exception), these non-dupes, as far as clini-
cal praxis is concerned, remain a stage behind the duped. Neurosis, we
recall, has “survived” the “ruin of the soul.”
165
In his ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the

School’ Lacan argued that despite the necessity of emptying Freud’s myths
of imaginary signification, the Name-of-the-Father and the mythic dit-
mension that supports it should not simply be swept aside:
I want to indicate that, consistent with the topology of the projective plane,
it is on the very horizon of psychoanalysis in extension that the internal
circle we outline as the gap of psychoanalysis in intension closes.
I would like to centre this horizon with three vanishing points of per-
spective, each one remarkable for belonging to one of the registers whose
collusion in heterotopy constitutes our experience.
In the symbolic we have the Oedipal myth … I would like to light my
lantern simply with the fact that if you withdraw the Oedipus complex,
psychoanalysis in extension, I would say, falls entirely into the jurisdiction
of President Schreber’s delusion.249
Before we assess what it is exactly that allows Lacan’s lantern to penetrate

the gloom and also what this gloom might be, we need to be certain of the
topology at stake. The extension or “horizon of psychoanalysis” is the vari-
ous resources that analysts have made use of to develop, renew and explain
psychoanalysis: literature, institutions and societies, linguistics, myth, et
cetera. Lacanian psychoanalysis has a particularly expansive extension. The
intension of psychoanalysis is the labour of close reading that takes place
in the clinic. While this work is informed by psychoanalysis in extension
it is not reducible to it: rather than relying on an applicable template,
the psychoanalyst must treat each case in its particularity. The “internal
circle” of intensional psychoanalysis and the external “horizon” of exten-
sional psychoanalysis are not inscribed on the Euclidean plane, with the
latter surrounding the former (as it does in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s
De revolutionibus orbium litteralium); instead, the horizon is marked by
three vanishing points situated on the cross-cap’s self-intersecting line,
the Möbian twist linking the most external point to the most internal
point in a relation of extimacy. The first of these points is the Oedipal
myth: insofar as an unthinking adherence to the extensional clutter of
“Oedipal ideology”—such as the separation of law and desire, the ideal
of Oedipal development, the reductive model of the nuclear family, and
so on—will limit the efficacy of intensional psychoanalysis, a shift from

myth to structure is necessary. However, if in his formalist zeal the ana-
lyst should go so far as to foreclose not just the imaginary symbolism of
myth but also the symbolic function of the castration complex, inten-
sional psychoanalysis would become a matter of p roducing non-dupes,
thus completely ignoring the neurosis that would survive such a project.
Furthermore, the accumulated knowledge and resources of extensional
psychoanalysis, having lost this nodal point, will become a disparate mess
of elementary phenomena that would require a mammoth and ingenious
delusion to bring together again. The closest we have to such a project
is probably the two volumes of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Of course, Miller’s determination “to think neurosis from
psychosis” in intensional psychoanalysis should only go so far.
The second vanishing point belongs to a different register: it concerns
the “imaginary identifications” with a “unit” such as a “society of psy-
choanalysis.”250 This was the challenge that Lacan was confronting in his
‘1967 Proposition’: how to construct an entirely necessary element of
extensional psychoanalysis—the École—without constricting the inge-
nuity of intensional psychoanalysis with the sens of the group? Having
remarked on two of the three vanishing points, let us pause on Lacan’s
observation that these points belong to “registers whose collusion in het-
erotopy constitutes our experience.” What is at stake in this oxymoronic
collusion in heterotopy (heteros—other, topos—place)? Although it is not
made explicit, Lacan is likely referring to a 1966 note appended to ‘On
a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ in which he
describes the transformation of the R schema into a cross-cap.251 Through
this procedure the different places of the imaginary, the symbolic and the
real come to collude at the self-intersecting line and the various math-
emes associated with these registers become vanishing points. Here, the
antipodal points of the quadrangle of the real must be joined in a Möbian
fashion (Fig. 3.4).
These are the terms:
Vanishing point of the symbolic: P (Name-of-the-Father)—φ (imaginary

phallus)
Vanishing point of the imaginary: I (ego ideal)—i (specular image)
Vanishing point of the real: M (primordial object or das Ding)—m (ego)
167
φ i
M
m
I P
Fig. 3.4 R schema on the cross-cap (Lacan’s R schema can be found in Écrits,
p. 462. He did not provide a presentation of the R schema on the cross-cap.
Here, we have transformed the square of the schema R into a circle, stretched
it to form a bowl and then performed the procedure depicted in Fig. 2.7)
If the father is present at the vanishing points of the imaginary and

symbolic—as the “ideal Father”252 (ego ideal) and the castrating func-
tion (Name-of-the-Father) respectively—he is absent from the vanishing
point of the real, the point of torsion between the imaginary of the ego
(m) and the real of jouissance (M). The vanishing points I—i and M—m
are particularly important because they belong to the quadrangle of the
real. In the imaginary collusion an element of the symbolic (ego ideal)
and an element of the imaginary (specular image) combine to obscure
the real. This is the effect of the group sens of the society. In the real col-
lusion the real and the imaginary combine to dominate the symbolic.
Lacan refers here to the “rearranging of social groupings by science”253
that reached its horrifying apogee in the concentration camps legitimated
by a primitive science’s classification of untermenschen. In this instance,
society and the subject were structured not by the signifier (P) and the
lack introduced by castration (−φ) but by an alarming coalition of the
ego (m)—its narcissism, aggressivity and reduction of identity to a mat-
ter of sameness and difference—and what Miguel Bassols has called “the
pure jouissance [M] of making the other disappear.”254 While the inertia
of the analysand’s jouissance provides an important reference point for
an intensional psychoanalysis that would otherwise be reduced to the
interminable study of différance, and the ego retains a sort of negative

importance insofar as it is that with which intensional psychoanalysis is
not concerned, the analysand should be reduced to neither.
In this presentation of the topological plasticity of an apparently rigid
schema and its fixed loci and registers, Lacan moved toward the paradoxi-
cal “collusion in heterotopy” that would be realised by his presentation
of the registers as the rings of a Borromean knot. In other words, if flat
diagrams such as the R schema gave the impression that the registers
are neatly segregated, this intuition would be unsettled by a topology in
which the mathemes are points of contact and involution between the
registers: “My discourse proceeds in the following way: each term is sus-
tained [not on its own but] only in its topological relation with others.”255
***
There is, Lacan uncertainly proposes in Seminar XIII, “something
which operates, perhaps, at the basis of the fact that Freud did not com-
plete … his second circuit.”256 Even more suggestively, Lacan then coyly
muses that there exists “some reason” which prevented him from giving
his Names-of-the-Father seminar and which “also touches precisely at this
delicate point of the limit at which Freud stopped.”257 What obstructed
father Freud and the Name-of-the-Father? It is, of course, the question
Freud repeated, the inscrutable real which his thought always missed: what
does woman want? Certainly, Freud’s attempts, reliant on the Oedipal
framework, to say what that is with regard to Dora, did not meet with
much success.
Backpeddling a little, it’s worth noting that the inability to achieve
scientific objectivity in the field of dream interpretation and to report
on his work without the report itself becoming replete with florid re-
presentations and ambiguity was a source of frustration for Freud: “The
dream business itself I consider to be unassailable; what I dislike about
it is the style, which was incapable of finding the simple, elegant expres-
sion and which lapses into overwitty, image-searching circumlocutions
[Umschreibung].”258 This is Freud’s acknowledgement that there is no
metalangauge: the rebus is not a compliant object-language; it taints
the interpretation and the report’s re-presentation of interpretation with
its slippery Umschreibung. In an instance characteristic of the notorious
polysemic richness of the ‘Dream of Irma’s Injection’, Freud tells us that
169
Irma “sträubt sich,” which Lacan translates as “hérisser”: Irma bristles

or stiffens up in resistance. Lacan remarks in Seminar XIII that “[t]he
use of the term sich straüben … [is] in this style, this Umschreibung, this
twisted [tordu] style, almost the only case where I can reconcile mine
with his.”259 Umschreibung means both circumlocution—to circle around
something—and reinscription. Taken together, these two actions consti-
tute the Möbian double-looped circuit of repetition thinking. This rela-
tion between thought and the real recurrs in Freud, for whom “when
all is said and done … a woman sträubt sich.”260 In this “twisted style,”
with which Lacan identifies, a dream about a hysteric who resists Freud’s
knowledge is itself a dream that resists Freud’s knowledge. In both cases
the resistance is structural; sich straüben is simply the name Freud gives
to the edge of a fault that cannot be sutured by the search for meaning.
A few sessions earlier, Lacan had offered his own idiosyncratic defini-
tion of Umschreibung:
[W]hat constitutes the novelty of the psychoanalytic approach … [is] that

the effect of language goes beyond … any subjective apprehension which
may authorise itself as being a conscious apprehension.
… [I]t is a matter of asking what has language produced as an inaugural
effect on which there reposes the whole montage, which gives the setting
[monture] of the state of the subject.
This is not tackled simply by looking at it head-on [le regarder en face].
[It concerns] the relationship of the being of knowledge to the being of
truth … If I say that there is no metalanguage, I emphasise it by the fact
that I am not attempting to introduce one …
The first condition to grasp that it is indeed a matter of a relationship to
a being of truth, is that, in discourse, it is articulated as an enigma … Freud
himself admitted it and recognised it as such when he wrote the
Interpretation of Dreams [Science des rêves], Umschreibung, [Freud] said,
enraged at not being able to reproduce the style of his previous little scien-
tific reports, Umschreibung, which means: mannerism. Throughout the
historical cases of the crisis of the subject, the literary and aesthetic explo-
sions in general of what is called mannerism always corresponds to a reor-
ganisation of the question about the being of truth.
Yes. It is a matter of finding a short circuit to rediscover [retrouver] our
object a.261
In this remarkable passage Lacan considers psychoanalysis’s prehistory,

the psychoanalytic subversion, Freud’s implementation of this subversion
and his own programme. We are familiar with the contention that the
signifier and its combinations escape egoic purpose and understanding
(“conscious apprehension”). This is the scientific “ruin of the soul” that
commenced when Descartes emptied the individual of thought content
(perceptions, assumptions, memories, etc.) in order to establish the basis
for a certain knowledge that is not derived from intuition. The psycho-
analytic novelty consists not in adding to these signifiers detached from
signifieds and consciousness but in reading “the effect of language.” This
effect inaugurates the “monture”—the setting or mounting—of the sub-
ject that cannot be studied as a single aspect (face). This is perhaps a
reference to the topological presentation (made in the seminar’s opening
session) of the relationship between knowledge and truth as equivalent
to that between the reverse and front ‘face’ of a Möbius strip. As the
subject moves along the path of knowledge’s accumulation and consoli-
dation, truth returns to question and rupture knowledge. This relation-
ship between truth and knowledge is integral to Lacan’s completion or
repetition of Freud’s circuit. Descartes both split and sutured knowledge
and truth when he stated that he could not be certain of the truth of his
knowledge and then affirmed that the truth of mathematical knowledge
is guaranteed by a non-deceitful God. The psychoanalytic subject—the
subject that occupies and is occupied by the acosmos of the barred (that
is, Godless) Other—cannot accomplish an equivalent suture, an envel-
opment of one sphere (man’s knowledge) by another (God’s truth): there
remains a “being of knowledge” and a “being of truth”; heterogeneous
aspects that noneless contitute a single structure; the “montage” of the
subject. Throughout this seminar Lacan refers to montage and monture
when discussing the structure of fantasy. The object a is mounted as a
picture or screen that implicates the subject in its construction and veils
the hole in the Other. In this montage there is S-barred—the “being
of knowledge” which Fink refers to as “the ‘pure subject’ of the [signi-
fying] combinatory or matrix[,] the subject without a cause”262—and
a—the “being of truth,” the cause of desire. Lacan’s alignment of truth
with cause—that is, the inarticulable answer to the analysand’s question:
“why do I suffer?”—means that it evades knowledge, that it can only be
half-said.
171
Whereas modern science forecloses truth—refusing to countenance

the Cartesian solution (i.e. making truth the responsibility of God), the
scientist only concerns himself with knowledge—psychoanalysis cannot
ignore it. Unfortunately, there is no psychoanalytic metalanguage that
can suture the beings of knowledge and truth or jettison the latter. Freud
admits as much when he complains that the Umschreibung of his Science
des rêves prevents him from producing “scientific reports” or that he is
blocked (sich straüben) from resolving the hysteric’s truth with his knowl-
edge. This “mannerism” or “twisted style” is a response to a particular
“historical case of the crisis of the subject,” the psychoanalytic “reorgan-
isation of the question about the being of truth.” Lacan aims to reduce
“mannerism”—he speaks of a “short-circuit”—but this reduction will
not constitute a metalanguage: the truth (object a) can only be refound
(retrouver) because it has been lost—its “fall” is “what … language pro-
duced as an inaugural effect”—and, furthermore, this will only be the
refinding of a loss because it never existed in the first place (that is, before
the signifier) as it is constituted as a remainder by the signifier.
Lacan writes the following on the board:
12345
The smallest whole number which is not written on this board.263
An audience member is tasked with writing on the board the smallest

whole number which is not written on the board and comes up with 6.
The problem is, that once this is done the task’s completion is displaced
because the written command reiterates itself. The smallest unwritten
number is now 7. The serial is endless; its resolution is eternally deferred:
“what is written as Φx … [has] the effect that one can no longer have at
one’s disposal the totality of signifiers.”264 In this dynamic demonstra-
tion, the object is only refound as a loss. “[T]his shows you … what is
at stake, it is in the question of language, founded, as you see on writ-
ing, the object a.”265 In Lacan’s number game the object is written as the
cause of the numbers (signifiers) we write—this cause being the sentence
beneath the numbers that lures us into an attempt to meet it—but it is
not writable as a number (signifier). Even the object-cause itself is both
something and nothing, both agalma (lure) and hole; it is a writing that
only refers to something that is not there. This is the experience of the
masculine subject who “never deals with anything by way of a partner but
object a.”266 In search of the signifier (knowledge) that will apprehend the
cause of his desire (truth), he believes in the possibility of a closed set and
its edge (∃x ¬Φx) but discovers only indefinite extension (∀x Φx). This
is, then, not the successful act of grasping the object—whatever we write
is always “not that”—but a “short-circuit” that circumvents the manner-
isms of more inelegant pedagogic poses: “It’s not a matter of analyzing
how [the sexual relationship] succeeds. It’s a matter of repeating until
you’re blue in the face why it fails … The failure is the object.”267
Lacan’s treatment of Freud’s “mannerism” saw him for the first “ten
years” (i.e. during the 1950s) laboriously construct a “French garden” out
of the Umschreibung of Freud’s “twisted” “tracks”268 by producing various
graphs and schemas such as the L schema which organised the imaginary
relationship between ego (a′) and image (a) and the symbolic relationship
between subject and Other. Lacan’s horticultural analogy—referencing
the imposition of a strict geometry on nature popular in sixteenth to
seventeenth century France—can leave us in little doubt as to what he
considers to be the guiding principle of his renewal of Freud. However,
with the “invention” of the object a—the “being of truth” that psycho-
analysis reorganises and which cannot be assimilated by (the being of )
knowledge or situated on the imaginary axis as an image (a) of the ego
(a′) but can only be presented topologically—Lacan’s French garden began
to more closely resemble the architecturally impossible Hanging Gardens
of Babylon or Escher’s Waterfall than it did the sensible harmony of the
grounds of Versailles. A year after he unveiled his topologerie in Seminar
IX, the IPA placed the French Freud on permanent gardening leave and
his “bande de Möbius”—the slippery “line-without-points” that is so
emblematic of the Lacanian challenge to ego psychology and the stability
of institutional sens—became “contraband.”269
Not content to merely straighten out and then re-twist Freud’s paths,
Lacan also wished to create some of his own: “[I]t is on the basis of the
elaboration of the pas-tout that one must break new ground … [and]
bring out something new regarding feminine sexuality.”270 First, there is
a rejection of the masculine logic of the exception: there does not exist a
173
subject (¬∃x) that is not subject to the law of castration (¬Φx). Despite
this, woman is not-wholly (¬∀x) subject to this law (Φx). Until the intro-
duction of an unprecedented logical category (pas-tout) whereby the
quantifier (all) is negated, things had made intuitive sense. Regarding
feminine sexuality, questions arise. How can there be both no excep-
tion to Φx and a refutation of its universal hold? How does the pas-tout
(woman is not-all subject to Φx) differ from the exception (there exists at
least one subject that is not subject to Φx)?
As Lacan acknowledges, “this not-whole [¬∀x Φx], in classical logic,
seems to imply the existence of the One that constitutes an exception [∃x
¬Φx].”271 The former appears to imply the latter’s existence insofar as they
both amount to an objection to the universal:
But that is true on one sole condition, which is that, in the whole or the
not-whole in question, we are dealing with the finite. Regarding that which
is finite, there is not simply an implication but a strict equivalence [between
¬∀x Φx and ∃x ¬Φx] … The not-whole becomes the equivalent of that
which, in Aristotelian logic, is enunciated on the basis of the particular.
There is an exception. But we could, on the contrary, be dealing with the
infinite. Then it is no longer from the perspective of extension that we must
take up the not-whole.272
The masculine set is closed thanks to the exception that constitutes its
limits. However, just as there is an infinite number of decimal points
between the finite limits of two whole numbers, the masculine subject, in
attempting to reach and breach the limit, experiences only the metonymy
of indefinite extension. There is (or, at least, there is presumed to be) a
universe, but man cannot complete it. Of the feminine topology Lacan
writes that while there exists no exception to the phallic function, the
all that we might be encouraged to speak of (i.e. all are subject to…) “is
an all outside universe, which is read right away [tout de go] from the
second quantifier as notall [pastout].”273 As Adrian Price notes, when we
follow Lacan’s contraction and read pastout all at once (tout de go), we
hear partout (everywhere): “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.”274

There is nowhere that the feminine subject is excluded from castration
but, because there is no limit constituted by an exception, this axiom
does not constitute a universe or an all: there is a cosmos of the not-all,
an open set, a structure that does not support the binary opposition of
complete-incomplete. While masculine logic allows us to refer to the uni-
versal or the unitary (i.e. there exists “all the men” or “one exception”),
feminine logic forbids both.
Russell Grigg provides a useful example of an alternative to the “per-
spective of extension”: there is a difference between saying “not every
apple is red”—here, we would interminably count apples until we
found an exception to the rule “all apples are red”—and saying that
while there does not exist an apple that is not red, “no apple is com-
pletely red. It is in this second sense in which Lacan’s ‘¬∀x Φx’ is to
be taken: No woman comes entirely under the phallic function.”275 As
Lacan puts it, woman is subject to Φx but that is not all: “It’s not
because she is not-wholly in the phallic function that she is not there
at all. She is not not at all there. She is there in full. But there is some-
thing more.”276 We have to be particularly careful with this “something
more,” which pertains to feminine jouissance, lest it becomes a part
with which to reconstruct a whole. It has led to a notorious confusion
which Lacan, pre-empting the delirium of écriture féminine, ridicules as
a “jouissance beyond the phallus”277 that reduces the not-whole (¬∀x Φx)
to the masculine exception (∃x ¬Φx) of whole jouissance. Granted, Lacan
does not help himself by referring to the ineffable experiences of medi-
eval mystics and the mute rapture of Bernini’s Saint Teresa for models
of feminine jouissance. Nevertheless, while phallic jouissance is directed
toward the object a that, once attained, would produce a whole in the
form of a seamless and lackless union with the totalised Other, woman’s
“jouissance is radically Other” insofar as she relates to “the Other in the
most radical sense,”278 the Other whose hole has not been plugged by
fantasmatic reality’s object: S(Ⱥ). As a traversal of fantasy, psychoana-
lytic practice leads the analysand from a masculine logic to a feminine
logic, from a neurotic avoidance of the Other’s lack to a recognition
and enjoyment of it.
175
3.7 The Topology of Interpretation

Lacan placed each of his terms (Ⱥ, a, Φ, etc.) in a topological relation
with one another, remarking of one of the four discourses that “[o]f
course, the form of letters in which we inscribe this symbolic chain is
of no great importance, provided they are distinct—that is enough for
some constant relations to become clear.”279 Certainly, it is apt that the
matheme of the barred subject has a line running through it but it is not
fundamental: of greater significance is the question of whether it occupies
the place of agent, Other, product or truth, what this means for its rela-
tion with, for example, knowledge and which terms are in an impotent
relation and which are in an impossible relation. Once we have situated
the letters, the relation between them becomes more important than the
letters themselves (that is, any signification we might attach to the let-
ters). However, it is not sufficient to merely formalise and present these
relations: they must also be radically altered.
If the evacuation of imaginary signification and symbolism from its
mathematical language was one of the integral traits of modern science
that Lacan most admired, another was its efficacy—and by this we do not
simply mean its ability to produce results and confirm its own knowledge.
This concerns the kind of real that science supposes. It is simply “not
worth the trouble to talk about anything except the real in which discourse
itself has consequences.”280 It is, in other words, pretty pointless discussing
a real that is considered to exist beyond discourse, as a brute materiality
impervious to the signifier, because discursivity here becomes little more
than a nominal description wonkily patched onto the real. This patch-
ing is open to historical variation (take, for example, the development of
poetic approaches to nature) but so long as the real is considered as exte-
rior to its representation (nature outside culture), it remains unchanged
by discourse. This is the “realist’s argument,” for whom, regardless of any
discursive apprehension or construction, “nature is always there,” preced-
ing and exceeding its representation:
I absolutely do not dispute it. Nature is there. The way physics distin-
guishes itself from nature is that physics is worth saying something about,
that discourse has consequences in it. In nature, as everyone knows—and
that is even why it is so loved—no discourse has any [consequences] at all!

… To be a philosopher of nature was never taken at any period as a certifi-
cate of materialism.281
Wittering on about nature, or whatever other name we might give to

that virginal, pre-discursive gloop that sits outside culture, is a poor indi-
cator of a materialist project. Affording to matter a radical primacy or
exteriority leads to a reification, an imaginarisation of the real that is far
from what physics accomplishes. In this respect, the post-structuralist
argument (i.e. the real is a variable discursive construction or an effect of
discourse, therefore: the real does not exist) is just as irresponsible as the
realist’s position (i.e. the real is absolutely outside discourse, therefore: it is
the only thing that authentically exists) since neither allow for a discourse
that has effects.282 Physics—which, in the above quotation, is exemplary
of the modern science that has replaced nature with the letter—has con-
sequences. If “physics does indeed give us a model of a discourse that is
worthwhile,” it is because it does not benignly “extend, like the goodness
of God, across the whole of nature.”283 The letters of physics are not a
representational screen laid over nature, mediating our access to it, but
instead aggressively cut into it, transforming it with events such as atomic
explosions or moon landings. These events began not with the manual
construction of a bomb or a shuttle but with the writing of letters.
Zupaničič writes that Lacan “bind[s] the realism of consequences to
the modality of the impossible. Together they could be articulated as fol-
lows: something has consequences if it cannot be anything.”284 A con-
dition and guarantor of the physicist’s realism of consequences is that
it is impossible for him to simply write whatever he likes. Internal to
the system of letters are a number of fundamental relations that govern
the viability of an equation. If there was not this impossibility restrict-
ing the use of letters we would remain in the realm of “idealinguistery,”
producing a discourse that had no consequences. As Lacan puts it; “[t]
he real is what commands the whole function of significance. The real is
what you encounter precisely by not being able, in mathematics, to write
just anything whatsoever.”285 His argument regarding psychoanalysis is
slightly different: it is perfectly possible to say anything you like, for as
long as you like and still call this psychoanalysis (and many do), but
177
this will not have an effect on the real of structure. The real is what you
encounter precisely by not being able, in psychoanalysis, to say just any-
thing whatsoever and still expect an effect. If “physics distinguishes itself
from nature” as something that is either indistinguishable from the signi-
fiers of culture or absolutely exterior, so must psychoanalysis:
[S]tructure … is to be taken in the sense of what is most real … [When] I

drew … topology, I underlined that in this case, it was in no way a kind of
metaphor. Either one thing or the other. Either what we are talking about
has no kind of existence, or, if the subject has one … it is constructed like
these things that I wrote on the board … On condition, of course, that you
know that … [it was only] to image for you certain connections that can-
not be imagined but on the other hand can perfectly well be written. The
structure is therefore real. It is determined by convergence towards an
impossibility …286
The stakes could not be higher; this passage concerns nothing less than
the very existence of the subject and, therefore, the possibility of effec-
tive interpretation, the possibility of a discourse that, with respect to the
subject, has consequences. In an admirably daring move Lacan confronts
us with a binary choice: either his topological structuralism is a meta-
phorical approximation (in which case the real of the subject is either an
effect of metaphor (qua meaning effect) or an immutable materiality), or
these fundamental relations are valid. In the first option, the subject “has
no kind of existence,” being either a discursive construction or a straight-
forward beyond of discourse; in the second, the subject has an existence
that has, and can be, affected by discourse. This is not a matter of manu-
facturing an extensional knowledge (such as the Oedipal myth/model)
that would guide the sens (both sense and direction) of a particular form
of intensional psychoanalysis, but of making intensional psychoanalysis a
discourse that has consequences.
The real of a structure such as the cross-cap is not simply that it resists
imaginary cognition and can only be written; it is, more importantly, that
defining quality (or qualities) that (1) establishes a set of invariant funda-
mental relations (“certain connections” between the being of knowledge
[S-barred] and the being of truth [a]), (2) is impossible for the structure
to both lose and remain the structure it is and, (3) is impossible to alter
through quantitative deformation—that is, without a cut. The psycho-

analyst’s interventions should be neither a description of the real nor a
testimony to the ultimate ineffability of the real:
To make you sense what I mean by a discourse that is valid, I would com-
pare it to a scissors’ cut in this material that I talk about when I talk about
the real of a subject. It is through this scissors’ cut in what is called structure
… that [structure] is revealed for what it is. If one makes the scissors’ cut
somewhere, relationships change in such a way that what is not seen before is
seen afterwards.287
It was in the 1972 écrit ‘L’étourdit’ that Lacan not only provided his most
definitive presentation of the relations but also formalised their transfor-
mation through a series of cuts.288
***
Returning to the previous block quotation, Lacan’s suggestion that the
relations that define the structure to be cut only become apparent retro-
actively (that is, after the cut) may seem a little odd. We can look at a
torus and easily apprehend its structure; we don’t need to start tearing it
apart to know that it has a tubular hole that rings a ‘central’ hole. Not
so, states Lacan: “A torus has a, central or circular, hole only for someone
who looks at it as an object [en objet], not for someone who is its subject.”289
Here we need to forget about the image of the torus and enter Flatland; a
mathematical space inhabited by mathematical bodies:
[Henri] Poincaré … introduced … the idea of these infinitely flat beings

which were able to subsist on the topological surfaces that he had brought
into circulation. These infinitely flat beings have a value, which is to make
us notice the following, namely, what they can and what they cannot know.
It is clear that if we suppose a topology, a structure which is itself a surface
inhabited by infinitely flat beings, it is certainly not in order for us to refer
ourselves to what you necessarily see represented here, namely, the plung-
ing into space of the aforesaid topological shapes.
For what subsists at the level of this topological structure [the torus] …
[as a] central hole, is absolutely impossible to perceive.290
179
Since the torus is bilateral and without an edge, an “infinitely flat being”
(a Flatlander) would never encounter the hole that his circuits organise.
Setting out in a straight line from Flatland’s capital, he would eventu-
ally return and, from this, gather that he is living on a sphere (and not
a plane). The subject of the torus, the neurotic desidero, is a Flatlander
inscribed on the torus as a one-dimensional line, a series of disjointed
circles (demands) that whirl around the torus to complete an additional
circle (desire). The toric subject is an infinitely flat being, a lack-of-being
that exists only in the circuitous path of his ceaseless navigation of meton-
ymy’s space-time and remains unaware of the ‘central’ hole that he traces.
Hence Lacan’s cryptic observation that “the evident is ratified by the
emptying.”291 The torus must be cut and emptied in order to retroactively
confirm that its apparent sphericity is a fiction. The relevant cut must
be possible to accomplish on a torus but impossible on a sphere; it must
inscribe an interior eight:
In attempting such a cut on the sphere we will only manage to trace
the good form of a circle that, like the Flatlander’s circuit on a torus,
closes on itself without failure and produces two unified (or unholed)
surfaces. Of course, a circle inscribed on a sphere is also reducible to
a point: while the toric Flatlander can also trace a circle, it retains an
ex-sistence founded on the irreducibility of an unacknowledged hole.
Unknown and yet ineradicable and structurally vital; such is the status
of unconscious desire/lack. An interior eight cut on the torus results in
a bilateral strip, the edge of which circumscribes a hole. Evidence of the
toric hole is therefore supplied by its being emptied and “relationships
change in such a way that what is not seen before is seen afterwards.”
This is of paramount importance because it unites the presentation of
structure (theory) with action in structure (practice), making the latter
dependent upon the former.
In such a procedure “the Möbius strip … shows itself to be compat-
ible with a torus” insofar as “[t]he conscious [i.e. imagined sphericity]
and the unconscious [as that which speaks in the Möbian structure of
language] communicate and are both supported by a toric world.”292 In
other words, we must move from the torus to the Möbius strip, dem-
onstrating how the latter’s unilateral asphericity inhabits the former’s
b ilateral surface. In order to empty the torus and provide evidence of the
unconscious and the hole, the cut requires “a precise number of turns of
saying for this torus to be made … a Möbius strip”293: the circuit must
comprise an odd number of turns around the circle of demand (the mini-
mum of which is one) and two around the circle of desire (see Fig. 3.5).
This cut produces a bilateral strip with two half-twists, the edges of which
can be sutured to arrive at the Möbius strip (effectively a reversal of the
operation in Fig. 2.3).
This is not a route to the Möbius strip to which we are accustomed:
normally we would apply a half-twist to a bilateral and rectangular strip
and join its ends (widths) at an “ideal cross-section [travers]”294 where
the recto of the bilateral strip would meet the verso. The “torus is better
than a cross-section”295 because we can construct from it a “‘true’ Möbius
strip,”296 a strip created not by joining its widths at an ideal point that
localises and fixes the traversal from one side to another, but by join-
ing its length (see Fig. 3.6): “it is along its whole length that it makes
only one of its front and its back.”297 In this instance, the “real-of-the-
structure” is not compromised by an idealisation. Similarly, for those that
perceive the cross-cap en objet, graphical representation demands that the
twist becomes a line, a “travers ideal” that, as Fierens observes, lends the
Möbian portion of the cross-cap “all the characteristics of a bilateral strip,
except for a strictly local peculiarity where the back is stitched onto the
front.”298 Furthermore, beneath this line that terminates at Φ, “[w]hat do
we see of [the Möbian portion]? Its inflation. Nothing is more of a nature
to take itself to be spherical.”299 For Lacan, it is the action one takes in
structure that will be decisive in one’s apprehension of structure.
In the structure of neurosis the toric subject is chained to the toric
Other and in each torus the circle/hole of desire is occupied by the other
torus’s circle/hole of demand. Any demand (to be recognised, loved,
informed, etc.) always implicates two desires or “two turns” because the
subject’s desire is the desire of the Other:
A torus … is the structure of neurosis, in as much as desire can, from the

indefinitely enumerable re-petition of demand, be looped in two turns. It
is on this condition at least that the contrabanding of the subject is
decided—in this saying that is called interpretation.
181
Fig. 3.5 The interior eight on the torus (See: SXIV, 15/2/67)
Fig. 3.6 Constructing a Möbius strip
I would simply like to get rid of the sort of incitement that our structural
topology can inspire.
I said the demand is numerable in its turns. It is clear that if the hole is
not to be imagined, the turn only ex-sists from the number by which it is
registered in the cut whose closing alone counts.
I insist the turn in itself is not countable; repetitive, it closes
nothing[.]300
We must once again rid ourselves of the misapprehensions that images of

topology “can inspire” and return to Flatland in order to understand the
numericty of demand (“indefinitely enumerable re-petition”) and desire
(“two turns”). The Flatlander has no way of counting the repetition of
demand; the ‘circle’ of demand does not intersect itself (see Fig. 2.4);
instead, it leads seamlessly into another demand (and another…). He
would be able to count if it was actually a series of closed circles that
he was tracing rather than a spiral. Therefore, “if the hole is not to be
imagined”—if, in other words, we are in Flatland rather than being the

detached observer who apprehends his own topology en objet—the turn
is only numerable when the subject has, through his indefinitely repeti-
tive spiral (i.e. “the turn in itself [which] is not countable”), completed
the circle of desire (itself the consequence of demand’s metonymy) which
is “looped in two turns” because the subject’s desire cannot be extricated
from the Other’s desire. It is this “closing alone [that] counts” and from
which “the contrabanding of the subject”—the transformation of sub-
jective structure from the neurotic torus to the bande de Möbius—“is
decided” by “this saying that is called interpretation.”
Interpretation is not restricted to a recording of demand; it instead
involves a reading (qua interpretative cut) of the subject’s desire (as the
desire of the Other) in his demands. The effective turn “ex-sists” in rela-
tion to the indefinite turns of demand that “close nothing” and thus cut
nothing. Interpretation is not a response to, or clarification of, demand;
it is a cut that makes evident the structure that the surface organised by
demand obscures: “desire is the cut through which a surface is revealed
as acosmic.”301 Finally, unlike desire, “the turns of demand are odd in
number”302 because analysis does not proceed by way of a series of back
and forth demands between the subject and Other, involving as it does
the frustration of demand rather than the erection of an imaginary dyad.
In ‘The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power’ we
are provided with a useful example. An obsessional neurotic complaining
of impotence makes a demand of his mistress—asking if she might be so
good as to sleep with another man and allow himself to spectate—in an
attempt to relinquish the responsibility of desire and avoid an encounter
with both his own and the Other’s castration. He also postulated a series
of confected obstacles; demanding that Lacan agree that his predicament
could be explained by menopause or repressed homosexuality. Refusing
to acquiesce to demand, Lacan was “rather off-putting” and the obses-
sional’s mistress “was no more indulgent in this regard,” responding to
the patient’s demand by relaying a dream that it had prompted: “In the
dream she had a phallus … which did not prevent her from having a
vagina as well, nor, especially, from wanting this phallus to enter it. On hear-
ing this, my patient’s powers were immediately restored … What inter-
pretation is indicated here?”303 The dream revealed to the obsessional the
183
distinction between the imaginary phallus (φ), the imaginary object that
the invited third party would have and use to enjoy in his stead, and the
symbolic phallus (Φ): “having this phallus”—the phallus in its imaginary
form as an image of the penis—“didn’t stop her from desiring it,” want-
ing the phallus to enter her vagina: “Which is why his own want-to-be
was touched.”304 Despite possession of the object, desire is not sated. The
Other’s castration touches upon his own castration and the dream, as a
reading of the obsessional’s “desire beyond his demand” “was an oppor-
tunity to get the patient to grasp the function the phallus as a signifier
serves in his desire. For it is as a signifier that the phallus operates in the
dream”305—a signifier, that is, of the Other’s desire.
Lacan, wittingly or not, encourages us to partner this rare clinical anec-
dote with his topological presentation in ‘L’étourdit’ by repeating a single
word in both: contraband. In the former we are told that “[t]he condi-
tion of desire that especially grabs the obsessive is the very mark by which
he finds desire spoiled, the mark of origin of its object—contraband.”306
The condition of the obsessional’s desire is that this desire must somehow
be perpetually thwarted so that he may avoid the failure that acting on
his desire might result in. In ‘L’étourdit’ “the contrabanding of the sub-
ject”—the cutting of the neurotic dialectic between demand and desire
that occurs when “the condition of desire” (contraband) is read beyond
those demands (to have his repressed homosexuality recognised or to
watch his mistress with another man) that would have “close[d] nothing”
even if they were satisfied—is accomplished by “the double turn of inter-
pretation”307 that re-turns the subject to his division. Where previously
the toric hole to which the Flatlander is oblivious was itself plugged not
by the object a—to orient his desire around its cause would have been
far too risky for the obsessional—but by the demand of the Other (the
Other that is coherent, consistent and non-barred), now the edge of what
Lacan calls the “bipartite Möbius strip”308 circumscribes the Möbian void
of S-barred (see Fig. 3.6). Bad form is retroactively shown, through an
interpretative cut, to have covertly occupied the apparent good form of
the toric surface not as a hidden depth or secret but as a circuit.
It is not especially clear, however, as to what clinical event the subsequent
suturing of the interior eight edge of the bipartite strip (not to its oppo-
site edge but to itself) presents. In attempting a reconstruction we might
combine the following passages, separated in the text by a few pages:
The [Möbius] strip is founded by being posed from the (Cantorian)

transfinite…
That adds a dit-mension to the topology of our practice of saying.
Should it not come under the concept of repetition inasmuch as it is not
left to itself, but that this practice conditions it, as we have also pointed out
about the unconscious?309
Psychoanalysis … only approaches [the unconscious] by the coming
into play of an Other dit-mention, the one that opens up in it from the fact
that the leader (of the game) ‘makes a semblance’ of being the major effect
of language, the object by which the cut that it allows is (a)nimated: this is
the object a to call it by the siglum I assign to it.310
Georg Cantor discovered the unimaginable, yet writable, realm of trans-

finite numbers (or sets); numbers that, like Desargues’s point at infin-
ity, actualised the infinite, giving it a written existence only deferred by
the potential infinity of numerical succession (e.g. 1, 2, 3…). As let-
ters, the transfinite numbers can be placed in relations with one another.
Importantly, Cantor defines a set as “any collection of definite elements
which can be united by a law into a whole.”311 Our first transfinite num-
ber or “limit ordinal” is ω which comes to represent (that is, unite into
a whole) the set of whole numbers: {1, 2, 3… n}. We can add to this set
(ω+1 or even ω+ω) or compare it with sets of different elements (the set
of square numbers, for example). According to Lacan, desire functions
as a transfinite number: the indefinite and potentially infinite whirl of
demands are only closed and counted as one by desire and the latter, in
doing so, proves itself greater than any numerical product of indefinite
extension.312 In a reading of desire, which acts as a closed cut, “repetition
… is not left to itself ”—it is not allowed to become an interminable
meander that closes nothing and is instead conditioned by “this practice.”
At this point we need to take a look at “the topology of our practice of
saying,” that is, the analyst’s discourse.
Fierens writes that “language only has an effect from the structure where
the real of the phallic function supplying for the absence of the sexual rela-
tionship justifies the real transfinite number of all the demands, namely
the desire that carries them.”313 In the analyst’s discourse the phallic sig-
nifier (S1) occupies the position of product. We are reminded of Lacan’s
185
observation that the mistress’s dream acted as an interpretative cut, moving

the obsessional from the imagined sphericity of the torus to the Möbian
topology of S-barred (occupying the position of the Other to whom the
agent of the analyst’s discourse addresses himself ), because it provided
“an opportunity to get the patient to grasp the function the phallus as a
signifier serves in his desire.” “That adds a dit-mension to the topology of
our practice of saying,” a dit-mension not of the imaginary (demands for
an imaginary object) but of the symbolic (desire), a dit-mension structured
by the phallic function. As Lacan’s pun in the second quotation suggests,
this dit-mension is a dit-mention (mentir=to lie) in which the truth can
only be half-said and it is in this failure to say it all that psychoanalysis
“approaches” the unconscious. However, the slippage from conscious to
unconscious, from signifier to signifier cannot occur on the bilateral strip.
The void of S-barred that is opened by the double-turn cut made on the
torus must be temporarily sutured so that the dit-mension of lines without
points can produce an edge (line without points) to which the object a
(out-of-line point) can be sewn. In other words, a sort of reconstruction
is required—a construction of the subject’s fundamental fantasy—so that
analysis moves from the structural fact of lack, so persuasively imaged by
the mistress’s dream, to the subject’s particular organisation of, or response
to, this lack. The fundamental relationship (topology) that must be con-
structed is neither the sexual relationship (the union of subject and Other
as One sphere), nor the relation between signifiers (the Möbius strip), nor
the neurotic relation between subject and Other (the intertwining of tori),
but the relation between the subject and that which falls from the relation
between subject and Other (the cross-cap).
Regarding the next stage of interpretation, the traversal of fantasy:
What topology teaches, is the necessary bond that is established between

the cut and the number of turns that it comprises for there to be obtained
from it a modification of the structure or of the asphere (l, apostrophe), the
only conceivable access to the real, and conceivable from the impossible in
that it demonstrates it.
Thus from the single turn that makes a spherically stable flap in the
asphere by introducing into it the supplement-effect that it takes on from
the out-of-line point, the ὀρθή δόξα. Double looping, this turn, obtains
something quite different: the fall of the cause of desire whence there is
produced the Möbian strip of the subject, this fall demonstrating it to be
only ex-sistence to the double-looped cut from which it results.314
In the above passage Lacan introduces two cuts: the first passes through
the asphere’s self-intersecting line once and transforms the entire struc-
ture into a disc that is bilateral and therefore “spherically stable,” while
the second passes through the self-intersecting line twice, closing itself
in a double turn and resulting in the separation of the Möbius strip
(S-barred) from the disc (a). In Seminar IX Lacan does make reference to
another form of cut (or, rather, non-cut); an asymptotic spiralling around
the “hole-point” of Φ that, like the toric reel of demands, “closes noth-
ing” (Fig. 3.7).315
We can recognise here the avoidance and procrastination of the obses-
sional neurotic,316 an endless indulgence of phallic signification/jouissance
(pleasure principle), or the structure of a hermeneutic interpretation
that concerns itself with the interminable search for meaning. If what
Zupaničič refers to as Lacan’s “realism of consequences” is to assert itself
in the clinic, the analysand cannot be left to free associate and say what-
ever he likes in perpetuity: “saying whatever—the very watchword of the
analysand’s discourse—is what leads to the Lustprinzip.”317 The analyst
“must from the outset have the idea, which is taken from my experi-
ence, that not just anything at all can be said [dit] … In our aspheres,
the cut, closed cut, is the said. It makes subject: whatever it circles …”318
It is up to the analyst’s judgement as to which signifier should close the
diachronic chain by retroactively looping back to its beginning (S1↔S2).
Fig. 3.7 The three different cuts on the cross-cap

187
As in mathematics “the real is what commands the whole function of

significance” not just because it is impossible to say or write anything
whatsoever and still produce an effective “said” or equation but that there
is something that cannot be said, something that is “impossible to say.”
A reading of the subjective asphere (fantasy) provides the “only conceiv-
able access to the real”—the impossible (what does not stop not writing
itself ) that is always missed by the necessity of repetition (what does not
stop writing itself ). The reality of fantasy must be made to “demonstrate”
the real. Without this consideration of the relation between thought and
the real, interpretation cannot be effective.
The choice is between two cuts that modify structure and a non-cut
that does not. Of course, as with the torus, what’s at stake here is not
just action in structure but the retroactive presentation of structure. We
have discussed the single-looped cut in the context of the master’s dis-
course: it is a cut that only ever produces the “supplement-effect” (a) and
induces the disappearance of the Möbius strip (S-barred). The asphere
is retroactively misapprehended as a spherical “surface-fiction.” What is
particularly interesting about this topology is that it can support both
the good form of a spherical cosmos and the bad form of an elliptical
and lacking acosmos. For the Flatlander, the result does not pre-exist the
interpretation; it is the cut that brings the surface into being. A circu-
lar, single-looped cut that is closed after having passed once through the
twist/line is the act of one who denies that a reversal (of orientation) has
taken place and imagines that his speech is unequivocal and his compre-
hension unquestionable. This cut is a refutation of the auto-differential
structure of the signifier; it traces a circular cut and is supported by the
presumption of a bilateral surface. In contradistinction to the double-
loop of S-barred, there is never a deficit or surfeit of meaning.
In analysis, “it is necessary to make two … circuits … to grasp what is
authentically involved in the division of the subject.”319 An inconsistency
in Lacan’s presentation of the interpretative cut is apparent. In Chap. 2
we looked at the median cut applied to the Möbian structure of language
as that which separates signifier from signifier, detaching the letter from
effects of signification, or, in ‘Radiophonie’, as that which “afterwards
provide[s]” a “Freudian double inscription” “with a recto and a verso.”
However, this is precisely the cut that, when the Möbius strip’s edge is
joined to a disc, only passes through the cross-cap’s line (twist) once and
reduces the asphere to “a spherically stable flap.” This discrepancy can be
partly explained by the difference in priorities: if in the example from
‘Radiophonie’ the desired retroactive effect is the rigorous isolation of
“an Other dit-mention” whose seamless interaction with conscious speech
had, previous to interpretation, gone unnoticed (in other words, the uni-
lateral had to be made bilateral), in ‘L’étourdit’ what must be confirmed
“afterwards” is the bad form of the asphere. In the first cut the existence of
a Möbian topology is presumed, in the second it must be made evident.
The median cut applied to the Möbius strip makes the strip disappear
but also makes a Möbian void demarcated by the cut’s edges (dis)appear
(see Fig. 2.3). A double-looped cut in the asphere makes the Möbius
strip appear because this cut, insofar as its line is an interior eight, is the
Möbius strip, the edge to which the surface is reducible. Nonetheless, it
is also an edge of the bipartite Möbius, the edge produced by the disap-
pearance of Möbius strip (see Figs. 2.3 and 3.6). This interplay of surface
and cut—whereby the surface is topologically reducible to the edge/line/
cut that is the edge/line/cut of its own (dis)appearance—means that, on
its own, the Möbius strip’s (S-barred) presence has little assurance or per-
manence. It is, as Miller puts it, a subject without substance. Therefore,
we need to nuance our implicit chronology: “What is remarkable in this
sequence [i.e. torus—bipartite Möbius—true Möbius—asphere] is that
the asphere, by commencing with the torus (it presents itself here at first
hand), only arrives at the evidence of its asphericity by being supple-
mented by a spherical [disc].”320 The asphere, first figured by a double-
looped cut on the torus, is only granted its consistence and ex-sistence by
the “surface-fiction” of the “supplement-effect” because the intermediary
stage (the constitution of S-barred) is so unstable and insubstantial. The
cause of desire is required for the lack or want of being to manifest itself.
It is not that a is sewn to a pre-given S-barred but that S-barred is consti-
tuted by being sewn to a and, ultimately, cut from a:
Line without points, I have said about the cut, insofar as it is, for its part,
the Möbius strip in that one of its edges, after the turn by which it is closed,
is pursued onto the other edge.
189
Nevertheless this can only be produced from a surface already pricked by

a point that I have called out-of-line because at it is such a way that it is
from a sphere that it is cut out, but by its double that looping it makes of the
sphere an asphere or a cross-cap.321
Returning to a previous quotation we can also resolve an earlier question:

unlike the cutting of the torus, the transition from bipartite Möbius
to true Möbius does not in itself correspond to any clinical event:
“Psychoanalysis … only approaches [the unconscious] by the coming
into play of an Other dit-mention, the one that opens up in it from the
fact that the leader (of the game),” the analyst, “‘makes a semblance’ of
being the … object a.” In transference the role of the analyst is to cause
the subject’s desire, thereby making this subject emerge as a desidero.
This is distinct from the early transferential structure of a toric concat-
enation wherein the subject either desires the Other’s demand (obses-
sional neurosis) or demands the Other’s desire (hysterical neurosis). The
formulation—the analyst “‘makes a semblance’ of being the … object
a”—an be read in two ways:
(1) The analyst must pretend (faire semblant) to be the cause of the analy-
sand’s desire by embodying the inscrutable desire (of the Other) that
is impossible for the analysand to pin down as a particular object or
a focus for an idealising identification (this would be to equate psy-
choanalysis with shopping and ego psychology respectively and lead
to a premature and alienating conclusion).
(2) The object a must be demonstrated to be a mere “semblance of being
… [that] only dissolves, in the final analysis, owing to its failure,
unable, as it is, to sustain itself in approaching the real.”322 While the
asphere’s disc was previously reducible to a point, it retained a stub-
born ex-sistence granted to it by the irreducibility of the Möbian
edge; now cut from its support it can vanish completely because a
zero dimensional point is only defined in relation to other terms
(e.g. as the intersection of two one-dimensional lines). It is the “fall”
of the object that retroactively “demonstrate[s]” “the Möbian strip of
the subject … to be only ex-sistence to the double-looped cut from
which it results.” The dissolution of fantasy is also the dissolution of

the discursive link (qua transference) between agent (a) and Other
(S-barred) in the analyst’s discourse. A semblance of the real (object
a) gives way to a recognition of the actual real (the impossibility of
the sexual relationship [between S-barred and a]).
The approach to the real, throughout which the object a cannot “sus-
tain itself,” is the approach to S(Ⱥ): it is with the barred Other, not a, that
the subject, following the traversal of fantasy, has a rapport. The imagi-
nary sphericity of fantasy is deflated when the subject is made aware of
the contingent character of his constrictive master signifiers—their origi-
nal contingency having become necessity by their continued insistence
in repetition—through a reading of the homophonic and grammatical
lapses produced by the inverted redoubling of his signifying articulations.
The masculine logic of the sphere closed by the exteriority of an exception
(∃x ¬Φx) and the universal (∀x Φx) is replaced by the feminine logic of
the “partout,” for which castration is everywhere and there is no outside
that will close the set (¬∃x ¬Φx), and the pas-tout (¬∀x Φx).
The analyst is the “subject-supposed-to-know-how-to-read-otherwise.
The otherwise [autrement] in question, is indeed what I write, for my
part in the following way: S(Ⱥ) … Otherwise designates a lack. It is a
matter of lacking differently [autrement].”323 As we will see in the next
chapter, it was not until Seminar XXIII that Lacan definitively outlined
what he meant by “manquer autrement” as a way of deriving jouissance
from the barred Other. ‘L’étourdit’ closes instead with a breathlessly
rhapsodic appraisal of the newly minted subject, whose progress consists
in the apperception that “the woman” (qua faultless complement that
would satisfy the desire to be One) is a “lure [leurre] of truth” that previ-
ously prevented the “hommodit” (man-of-the-said) from passing to “the
moment [l’heure] of the real” when the bounded “heaven” of the constel-
lated Other is “broken” by “being notall.”324 There is “no progress to be
expected from either truth or well-being, but only the swerving from
[the] imaginary impotence,” blamed on particular figures and the loss of
imaginary objects (−φ), “to the impossible that establishes itself as being
the real in only founding itself on logic,”325 that is, the impossibility of
the sexual relationship caused by a “fact of structure” (Φx). This progress
191
from masculine logic to feminine logic is accomplished by the retroac-

tive “highlighting of the asphere of the notall: this [i.e. fantasy] is what
supports the impossible of the universe—or to take my formula, what
encounters the real in it.”326 It is, in other words, the progress of a double-
looped re-turn, a reading of “structure in its impossibilities.”
***
In Seminar XXIV, Lacan wistfully reflected that in ‘L’étourdit’ he
“almost” manufactured a metalanguage, settling instead for “a sem-
blance [semblant] of metalanguage” by “writing s’embler, s’emblant
to metalanguage. Making a reflective verb of this s’embler, detaches it
from this coming to fruition which being is.”327 In Old French, embler
(to steal) is derived from the Medieval Latin imbulare, itself a variation
on the Classical Latin involare for which the modern French equivalent
is voler—meaning both to purloin and fly (we might think here of the
link in English between to steal and steal away). In ‘L’étourdit’, the word
appears when Lacan recites his assertion that the ex-sistence of an excep-
tion to castration, the subject for whom the phallic function is forfeited,
is only ever a semblance or “resembling [sembler] … de s’y embler,”328
never “coming to fruition” as a being. What Lacan is perhaps getting at
with this lalangue is that ‘L’étourdit’, by revealing the tyrannical father of
Totem and Taboo to be not a being but a s’emblant who only seems (sem-
bler) to steal (embler) jouissance (leading one to confuse circumstantial
impotence with the structural impossibility [Φx] that causes being and
jouissance to ‘exist’ in perpetual metonymic flight), through an apparently
metalinguistic presentation of the logic of sexuation and the apsherical
topology, constitutes his purest and most unreadable (that is, most meta-
linguistic) demonstration of the impossibility of excepting oneself from
castration and producing a metalanguage.
It was with logic, linguisterie and topologerie that Lacan’s second circuit
sought to transform psychoanalysis into a rigorous “science of the real”
with its ancestry traceable to the epistemic break of the modern “science
without consciousness”: “If my saying asserts itself, not, as is said, from
a model, but from the purpose of articulating discourse itself topologi-
cally, it is from the defect in the universe that it proceeds, on condition
that neither does it claim to supply for it.”329 With the completion of
Freud’s double-looped circuit, Lacan’s re-turn retroactively presented

not the sphere of the psychologist’s ego but the asphere of the psycho-
analyst’s subject and exceeded Freud’s intellectual terminus—the ‘rock
of castration’ as the cause of Spaltung and the sexual relationship’s non-
existence—without posing an exception.
***
Soon after ‘L’étourdit’ was published in the Lacanian journal Scilicet,
the topology of surfaces gave way to the topology of knots and a new
project, heralded by the tenth session of Seminar XX (titled ‘Rings of
String’), began in earnest. This change in topologies was accompanied
by a conceptual shift: psychosis, jouissance, the body and the symptom
would all be of capital importance. The fundamental relationships at
stake in these concepts required a fixity and materiality that Klein bottles
and Möbius strips, for all their effective subversion of the fixity and mate-
riality of traditional ontology, could not provide.
3.8 Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’, in Acts of Literature, ed.
Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 312.
2. Jacques Lacan, ‘Geneva Lecture on the Symptom’, trans. Russell Grigg,
Analysis, no. 1. (Melbourne: Centre for Psychoanalytic Research, 1989),
p. 15.
3. SXIV, 1/2/67.
5. Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, ‘Beckett the Poet’, in A Companion to Samuel
Beckett, ed. S. E. Gontarski (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p. 216.
7. SXIV, 15/2/67.
8. Ibid., 24/4/67.
9. Christian Fierens, Reading L’étourdit, trans. Cormac Gallagher, p. 5.
10. Fierens, Reading L’étourdit, p. 22.
11. Sigmund Freud, ‘Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis’, in The
193

13. SXI, p. 49.
14. SXI, p. 50.
16. SXI, pp. 53–54.
17. SXIV, 1/2/67.
18. SXXI, 15/1/74.
19. Ibid.
20. SXIV, 25/1/67.
21. Ibid., 24/4/67.
22. Ibid., 15/2/67.
23. Ibid., 1/2/67.
24. Ibid., 21/6/67.
25. SXIII, 8/6/66.
26. Ibid.
27. SXIV, 21/6/67.
28. Ibid., 1/2/67.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid.
32. SXXIII, p. 74.
33. SXI, p. 7.
34. SXIV, 1/2/67.
35. SXVII, p. 77.
36. SVII, p. 203.
37. SXX, p. 117.
38. SXI, pp. 7–8.
39. SXIV, 7/12/66.
40. SXI, p. 54.
41. SXX, p. 38.
43. Samuel Beckett, Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (London:
Calder Publications Ltd., 1994), p. 414.
44. Jean-Claude Milner, L’oeuvre claire, Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Paris:
Seuil, 1995), p. 169.
46. SXXIII, p. 113.
47. Ibid.
48. Shoshana Felman, Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis
in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989),
p. 54.
49. SXI, p. xxxix.
50. SXVII, p. 128.
51. SXXIII, pp. 110–112.
52. Derrida, ‘Psyche’, p. 316.
53. SXIV, 15/2/67.
54. SXIII, 1/6/66.
55. Ibid.
56. SXVI, 27/11/68.
57. SXIII, 1/6/66.
58. Ibid.
59. SXVI, 14/5/69.
60. SVII, p. 265.
61. Ibid., p. 264.
62. Ibid., p. 279.
63. SXIII, 1/6/66.
64. Ibid.
65. Sigmund Freud, ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 2, trans. James
Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 12.
67. Sigmund Freud, ‘Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 11,
trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 19.
69. SXIII, 1/6/66.
71. Jacques Lacan, ‘Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin’, unpublished,
trans. Jack W. Stone, p. 1. ‘Préface à l’ ouvrage de Robert Georgin’, in
Robert Georgin, Cahiers Cistre No. 3: Lacan (Paris: l’Age d’homme, 1977),
pp. 9–10.
72. Lacan, ‘Lituraterre’, p. 4. Autres écrits, p. 15.
73. SVII, p. 35.
74. Ibid., 37.
75. Ibid., pp. 25–27.
76. Ibid., p. 37.
195
77. Ibid., p. 39.

78. SXI, p. 46.
80. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, trans. James Strachey
(London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 235–239.
81. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 276, 277, 278, 297, 308 & 313.
82. SII, p. 321.
83. Lacan, ‘Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin’, p. 1. ‘Préface à l’ ouvrage
de Robert Georgin’, p. 10.
85. Ibid., p. 308.
86. Ibid., p. 303.
87. Ibid., p. 304.
88. Alenka Zupančič, ‘Realism in Psychoanalysis’, in JEP: European Journal of
Psychoanalysis 32, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa (Milan: IPOC, 2011), pp. 42–43.
89. Jacques Lacan, ‘Yale University, Kanzer Seminar’, unpublished, trans. Jack
W. Stone, p. 4. Scilicet, p. 13.
90. Zupaničič, ‘Realism’, p. 42.
92. SXXII, 17/12/74.
93. SXI, pp. 23–24.
94. Ibid., p. 49.
95. Ibid., p. 25.
97. Ibid., p. 337.
98. SXI, p. 25.
99. Ibid.
100. SXVII, p. 35.
101. Ibid., p. 149.
102. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 304–305.
106. Ibid., pp. 23–24.
107. SXI, p. 26.
108. SXVI, 26/3/69.
109. Ibid., 14/5/69.

111. Ibid.
112. Jacques Lacan, ‘Address on Child Psychoses’, trans. Adrian Price and
Beatrice Khiara-Foxton, Hurly-Burly, no. 8 (London: NLS, 2012), p. 271.
116. SVII, p. 110.
117. SXI, p. 168.
119. Ibid., p. 23.
120. Ibid., pp. 30–31.
121. Ibid., p. 30.
122. Ibid.
123. SXIV, 25/6/67.
124. SXIX, 9/2/72.
125. Ibid.
126. SXX, p. 111.
127. SXIX, 9/2/72.
128. Ibid.
129. The figures in question can be found on pages 88–89 of the French edi-
tion of Seminar XIX.
130. SXIX, 9/2/72.
131. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm’,
trans. Asunción Álvarez, The Symptom 11 (2010), unpaginated.
133. Jacques-Alain Miller, Invention of Delusion, trans. G. S. Marshall,
International Lacanian Review V (2008), p. 22.
134. Miller, ‘Invention of Delusion’, pp. 24–25.
135. Ibid., p. 21.
136. SIII, p. 16.
137. Miller, ‘Invention of Delusion’, p. 20.
138. SXI, p. 176.
139. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Interpretation in Reverse’, in The Later Lacan: An
Introduction, eds. Véronique Voruz and Bogdan Wolf (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2007), p. 7.
141. Miller, ‘Interpretation in Reverse’, p. 8.
197
142. Ibid., p. 7.

143. Miller, ‘Invention of Delusion’, p. 24.
145. Lacan, ‘Joyce the Symptom’, in SXXIII, p. 144.
146. Miller, ‘Two Clinical Dimensions’.
147. Ibid.
148. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘From Symptom to Fantasy and Back’, trans. Ellie
Ragland, The Symptom 14 (2013), unpaginated.
149. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Another Lacan’, trans. Ralph Chipman, The
Symptom 10 (2009), unpaginated.
150. SXX, p. 80.
151. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Paradigms of Jouissance’, trans. Jorge Jauregui,
Lacanian Ink 17: Aesthetics (2000), p. 41.
152. Miller, ‘From Symptom to Fantasy’.
153. Ibid.
154. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, p. 305.
155. Scott Wilson, The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), p. 3.
156. Miller, ‘From Symptom to Fantasy’.
157. Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of
Television’, in Lacan, Television, pp. xvii–xviii.
158. SX, p. 214.
160. SXVII, p. 31.
161. Jacques Lacan, ‘Introduction to the German Edition of the First Volume
of Écrits’, unpublished, trans. Jack W. Stone, p. 2. Autres écrits, p. 555.
163. SXVII, p. 87.
164. Ibid., p. 73.
165. Ibid., p. 179.
167. SXX, p. 127.
168. Lacan, ‘German Edition’, p. 2. Autres écrits, p. 555.
172. SXII, 16/12/64.
173. SIX, 13/6/62.
174. Ibid., 27/6/62.

177. SXX, p. 43.
179. Lacan, ‘L’étourdit’ (second turn), p. 5. Autres écrits, pp. 452–453.
180. Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble
Books, 1981), pp. 59–60.
181. SXX, p. 81.
182. Alexandre Koyré, ‘Galileo and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas 4, no.
4 (1943), p. 419.
183. Koyré, ‘Galileo and Plato’, p. 419.
184. SXVII, p. 45.
185. SXX, p. 70.
186. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A
Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1992), p. 110.
187. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Letter, p. 108.
188. Ibid., p. 114.
189. Ibid., p. 105.
190. Ibid., p. xxviii.
191. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 2004),
p. 234.
192. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Letter, p. 132.
193. Ibid., p. 121.
195. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, Letter, p. xv.
196. Ibid., pp. 126–127.
197. SXVI, 21/5/69.
198. SXX, p. 11.
199. Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000),
p. 55.
200. Steven M. Rosen, Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of
the Lifeworld (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2006), pp. 8–9.
201. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 533.
202. SXXV, 11/4/78.
203. SVI, 8/4/57.
199
204. SXIV, 12/4/67.

205. SXVIII, 17/3/71.
207. SXVII, p. 123.
209. SXVIII, 9/6/71.
210. Ibid.
211. SXXI, 12/2/74.
212. SXVIII, 9/6/71.
213. SXVII, p. 123.
214. SXVIII, 17/3/71.
215. Ibid., 9/6/71.
216. SXVII, pp. 127–129.
217. Ibid., p. 124.
218. SXIV, 15/2/67.
219. SXVII, p. 127.
220. SXVIII, 19/5/71.
221. Russell Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press,
2008), p. 49.
222. SXVII, p. 99.
224. SXI, p. 33.
225. SXVII, p. 122.
226. Freud, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ (First Part), p. xxvi.
227. SXVII, p. 122.
228. SXVI, 30/4/69.
229. SXVII, p. 120.
230. SX, p. 81.
231. SXIII, 15/6/66.
232. SXVII, p. 120.
233. SXIII, 15/6/66.
234. Ibid.
235. SXVII, p. 117.
236. Ibid.
237. SXIII, 15/6/66.
238. Ibid.
239. SXV, 28/2/68.
240. Ibid., 20/3/68.
241. Ibid.
242. Ibid.
243. Lacan, ‘L’étourdit’ (first turn), p. 12. Autres écrits, p. 460.
244. Lacan, Je parle aux murs, p. 102.
245. Ibid., p. 103.
246. SXVI, 29/1/69.
249. Jacques Lacan, ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of
the School’, trans. Russell Grigg, p. 9. http://iclo-nls.org/wp-content/
uploads/Pdf/Propositionof9October1967.pdf (accessed 3 March 2016).
250. Lacan, ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967’, p. 9.
251. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 486–487.
252. Lacan, ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967’, p. 10.
253. Ibid.
254. Miguel Bassols, ‘The Analyst and his Politics’, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 8
(London, 2002), p. 118. In this essay Bassols delivers a more detailed
account of the three vanishing points than we have provided here.
255. SXI, p. 89.
256. SXIII, 15/6/66.
257. Ibid.
258. Quoted in Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000), p. 122.
259. SXIII, 15/6/66.
260. Ibid.
261. Ibid., 20/4/66.
263. SXIII, 20/4/66. See also: SXIV, 23/11/66.
264. SXIX, 15/12/71.
265. SXIII, 20/4/66.
266. SXX, p. 80.
267. Ibid., p. 58.
270. SXX, p. 57.
271. Ibid., p. 103.
272. Ibid.
201
274. Adrian Price, ‘“I start off from the limit”: On the First Lesson of Seminar
XX, Encore’, Lacunae 11 (2015), p. 144.
275. Grigg, Lacan, Language and Philosophy, pp. 85–86.
276. SXX, p. 74.
277. Ibid.
278. Ibid., p. 81.
279. SXVII, p. 15.
280. SXVI, 20/11/68.
281. Ibid.
282. The most effective and influential Lacanian account of a (sexual) real that
is neither biologically nor linguistically determined can be found in
Copjec, Read My Desire, pp. 201–236.
283. SXVI, 20/11/68.
284. Zupaničič, ‘Realism’, p. 40.
285. SXIX, 12/1/72.
286. SXVI, 20/11/68.
287. Ibid.
288. We should declare here the extent of our debt to Christian Fierens’ book,
Reading L’étourdit (Lecture de L’étourdit), which, as a meticulous commen-
tary on this most enigmatic écrit, manages to make the unreadable just
about readable. Considerations of space and patience dictate that our
reading will be very limited in comparison and we will concentrate pri-
marily on Lacan’s topological references.
289. Lacan, ‘L’étourdit’ (second turn), p. 15. Autres écrits, pp. 485–486.
290. SXIII, 30/3/66 1884.
292. SXXIV, 14/12/76.
294. Ibid., pp. 2, 470.
295. Ibid., pp. 16, 486.
296. Ibid., pp. 2, 470.
297. Ibid., pp. 2, 470.
300. Ibid., pp. 16, 486.
301. SXII, 3/2/65.
304. Ibid., p. 529.

305. Ibid., p. 528.
306. Ibid., p. 529.
308. Ibid., pp. 2, 470.
309. Ibid., pp. 16, 486.
310. Ibid., pp. 19, 489.
311. Quoted in Joseph Warren Dauben, Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and
Philosophy of the Infinite (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990),
p. 170.
312. Of course, this is an incredibly unsophisticated and truncated account of
Cantor’s transfinite which does not even touch on the vital distinction
between ordinal and cardinal numbers. However, given that Lacan only
refers to “the order (understand: the ordinal)[,] for which I effectively
cleared the way in my definition of repetition” (‘L’étourdit’ (second turn),
p. 16. Autres écrits, p. 487), in this passage, a lengthy detour through the
finer points of set theory is probably unnecessary.
315. SIX, 6/6/62.
316. This is suggested by Bernard Vandermersch in ‘Pour introduire le cross-cap’,
http://www.freud-lacan.com/freud/Champs_specialises/Presentation/
Le_cross_cap_de_Lacan_ou_asphere, unpaginated.
317. SXX, p. 84.
319. SXIII, 11/5/66.
321. Ibid., pp. 13, 482.
322. SXX, p. 95.
323. SXXV, 10/1/78.
327. SXXIV, 8/3/77.
4
The Borromean Knot
4.1 From Topography to Knots

Let us return here to the question posed at the conclusion of Chap. 1,
section 1: did Lacan succeed in his self-professed aim to “give you un
bout de réel”? On the basis of what criterion would such an attempt be
judged? Would we know about it if Lacan had succeeded? We are, to
recall Badiou’s depiction, left with the unfathomable spectacle of a man
who continued to gesture toward the real, leaving one uncertain as to
“what this gesture indicates and truly implies.” How can we overcome
the critical paralysis that risks equating this final gesture with a vague
mysticism without doing the very same thing that makes baffled paralysis
look like the only suitable attitude—without, in other words, coming
to rehabilitate this gesture by imposing upon it the common sens of an
indicated direction and a meaningful implication?
Let us first note that Lacan’s gesture was not groundless: he pointed
his finger at an unspeakable real that he had written in the form of the
Borromean knot: “What is important is the Borromean knot and that for
the sake of which we accede to the real it represents to us.”1 If the real is

strictly unthinkable, it is an indication of this writing’s effectiveness that

“thinking-the-Borromean-knot will give [donnera] you pain. Because it is
not easy to imagine, which gives a proper measure of what all thinking
is.”2 Lacan’s hyphenated bloc warns against forcing the knot into the same
space as conscious theoria—the rehabilitative act of combining it with an
egoic thought that misrecognises the “real-of-the-structure” for a coher-
ent image. The difficulty inherent to “thinking-the-Borromean-knot”
promises to tell us something about thought itself—that is, thought as
connaissance (“imagine”) not savoir.
If this knot gives pain rather than bequeathing knowledge, psychoanaly-
sis, as either a pedagogic or curative discourse, is perhaps at its most prob-
lematic when it is, during Lacan’s final seminars, presented through such a
topology. The teacher and doctor’s closing remarks in the eighth session of
Seminar XXII exemplify the inscrutable posture he adopted in these final
years: “Whether this clarifies the practice of analytic discourse, I leave you to
decide.”3 If, as we saw in Chap. 1, Lacan gave the knot that itself gives pain
so that his pupils “might find their way in their practice,” if a nodal practice
lacked a universalising framework that would empty analytic practice of its
risky particularity, so would the knot’s clarification of practice: both theory
and practice required a decision from the individual. The problem is, of
course, that “[f ]iguring the knot is not easy. I do not say ‘figuring it for
yourself,’ because I completely eliminate the subject. I take my departure,
on the contrary, from the thesis that the subject is determined by the figure
in question. Not that it would be its double.”4 The conscious subject, as
one who perceives and apprehends the object (figure), cannot operate here;
he is instead apprehended by the knot to such an extent that he cannot
be detached from it (it is not even his specular double) without this knot
being the thing-in-itself. On the one hand we have the reassertion of the
individual and on the other we have the elimination of the subject. There
is a subject of the knot (not a knot for a subject) who is subjected to, and
individualised by, a determinative particularity: the symptom. Therefore,
the knot made the process of teaching—of figuring something in such a
way that allows others to figure it out—utterly torturous: “Last time, I was
too tangled up in my knots … to have the slightest inclination to speak to
you about it. I was in a pickle, but now I am a little less so, because I think
I’ve found a few transmissible items.”5
4 The Borromean Knot
205
These “items,” transmitted as paratactic jabs which we will attempt

to thread together, were often the result of unanticipated discoveries
made by Lacan and his mathematician friends in the act of writing knots.
Psychoanalysis, at times lost under the tide of a Borromean fascination—
the knot, like any insoluble symptom, is a source of both unease and
“infatuation”6—reappears, altered, not by a historicisable influence or a
clinical incident, but by an alteration made to the knot itself. How can this
extraordinary claim to the knot’s practical fecundity (which distinguishes
it from the previous topology of surfaces that only embodied psychoana-
lytic paradoxes or demonstrated psychoanalytic acts) be justified?
All too frequently, the knot is banalised by being deployed as little
more than a glorified Venn diagram that efficiently summarises the the-
oretical developments that emerged in Lacan’s seminars of the 1970s.
In doing so, one skips a step; exploring the theoretical developments
contemporary with the appearance of the knot in Lacan’s work without
asking why the knot was, for Lacan, the only viable support for such
developments in the first place.
***
We can begin by reproducing the statement Lacan made at Caracas
regarding the knot, whilst italicising an important detail omitted last time:
My three are not the same as [Freud’s id, superego and ego]. My three are
the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. I came to situate them by means
of a topology … The Borromean knot highlights the function of the at-least-
three. This is the one that ties in the other two that are not tied to each other.
I gave that to my pupils … But do they find their way any better than
with the topography Freud passed down to his?7
This is the Borromean knot’s qualitative real: it is impossible that it be

made with anything less than three rings. A third ring fulfils “the func-
tion of the at-least-three” by making one knot. As a function, it is a fact
of structure. However, we’ve been here before: it is a curious structural
quirk but does it really warrant quite so much fuss? Why did “think[ing]
of ” “these histories I have called … ‘rounds of thread’ give” Lacan “a lot
of worry”?8 We are touching here upon the third part of Lacan’s “clearing”
operation: the progression from presenting things in terms of Freud’s
case histories to a presentation of the knot. What is it about these rings
that worry us more than any case history could? How is it that the knot
induces a shift from “thinking of,” from apprehension and imagining
(“which gives a proper measure of what all thinking is”), to an affective
experience of worry?
The case histories were transformed by Freud’s followers into some-
thing like a series of interpretative templates. The knot, on the other
hand, was not nearly so helpful. It instead heralded a crisis of interpreta-
tion. Lacan, taking advantage of the qualitative homogeneity of the knot’s
components, named each ring real, symbolic or imaginary, thereby undo-
ing any notion that the categories were ordered or absolutely distinct.
Therefore, Lacan’s “three” and Freud’s “three” are distinguished not just
by terminology and concept but by place. Indeed, if the place is wrong,
the concept loses its sense. In a 1966 interview Lacan indicated as much
by stating that psychoanalysts
have … an aversion for the unconscious … [because] they don’t know

where to put it. This is understandable; it does not belong to ‘the Euclidean
space,’ we must construct its proper space … [Psychoanalysts] prefer to
have recourse to notions like the ego, superego, etc. which are found in
Freud, but which are also homonyms with notions that have been utilised
for a long time, so that to use them permits an implicit return to their
ancient acceptations.9
Where, in relation to ancient notions such as consciousness (ego) and the

law (superego), is one to place the unconscious? If the space is Euclidean,
if we can plot positions with coordinates, should the unconscious be
above or below the ego? (Here, ego psychology would involve something
like a re-arranging of this space.) Or is it not that the discovery of the
unconscious demands that the space itself must change if it is to find a
place for the unconscious—if, in other words, the discovery is not to be
reversed by the “ancient acceptations” that are cognate with a geometry
that denies various structural paradoxes (nullibiquity, extimacy, etc.)?
The Borromean knot’s absence of order, as the consequence of the “func-
tion of at-least-three” that is inherent to the knot’s structure, the fact that
there is no dominant term, is in marked distinction to Freud’s second
topography, the vertical organisation of which Lacan held partly respon-
sible for ego psychology (Fig. 4.1).
207
Fig. 4.1 Freud’s second topography (Figure retrieved from: http://www.

freud.org.uk/about2.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/w/index.php?curid=9966760. For original location, see: Sigmund Freud,
‘The Ego and the Id’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 19, trans. James Strachey [London: Vintage,
2001], p. 24)
Trapped at the bottom, “the Es [Id] is not sufficiently emphasized

by the way it is presented”10 and thus becomes either the object of a
naive depth psychology that mines for a hidden secret—the “all” that the
subject cannot say—or the target of an ego psychology whose principal
weapon resides above. The unconscious is thought of as a discrete part of
the space rather than that which splits Euclidean space when “ça parle.”
This topography’s influence in the development of ego psychology was
partly due to interpretative error but this potential for error is, Lacan
argues, endemic to topographical representation itself: “it is the exem-
plary fate of diagrams—insofar as they are geometrical, that is—to lend
themselves to intuitions based on ego-like errors.”11 If Lacan’s pupils are
to “find their way in their practice” “better” with the topology given to
them “than with the topography Freud passed down to his,” it will be
precisely because it challenges the misguided egoic assumptions to which
Freud’s topography is so amenable.
After this spatial ordering of ego and Id, the second “ego-like error”
encouraged by Freud’s topography is the naive intuition of a clearly
defined interior and exterior. Freud has created a “geometry of the sack”
that “is supposed to contain … the drives”12 and is kitted out with the ego’s
“acoust” or “cap of hearing” which Lacan, in reference to the nineteenth
century inventor of sound recording devices, sardonically labels “a black

box of some contraption worthy of [Étienne-Jules] Marey.”13 This sphere,
antinomic to Lacan’s envelope structure which implicates the subject in
the field of vision, is topped off with the eye of perception-consciousness.
“What a contrast,” he opines, between this spherical imaginary body that
encloses the drives and “the definition Freud gives of the drives as linked
to the orifices of the body. This is a crystal clear formulation that calls for a
different depiction from this bottle, of which anybody could be the stop-
per.” In its place, Lacan offers “the Klein bottle, which has neither inside
nor outside.”14 The real of the Klein bottle is the impossibility of it abso-
lutely containing or excluding anything. This is the carved, topological
body (to which we first referred at the conclusion of Chap. 2, section 1),
the body for which the Euclidean distinction between Innenwelt and
Umwelt does not hold.
Perhaps nowhere is the continuity between the body’s interiority and
exteriority more disquietingly asserted than in the spoken and speaking
being’s experience of a voice, as the object of the invocatory drive, that
both invades this holed body from the outside and escapes from the inside:
There has to be something in the signifier that resonates … [T]he drives are
the echo in the body of a fact of saying … [T]he body is sensitive to it
because it has a few orifices, the most important of which is the ear because
it can’t be sealed, shut or closed off. It is because of this that there is a
response in the body to what I have called the voice.15
The voice is that which in the signifier exceeds this signifier’s instrumental
brief. Rather than merely communicating, the signifier has resonated: it
has had an effect on the corporeal subject precisely because it has not been
understood. The most momentous experience of traumatic misunder-
standing is, of course, the missed encounter with the Other’s desire/lack
which serves as the desidero’s cause: “If the desire of the subject is founded
on the desire of the Other … [t]he voice is … the instrument in which
there is manifested the desire of the Other.”16
Contrary to what is suggested by Freud’s “acoust.,” which he positions
on the sack’s exterior like a separate department, the subject does not sim-
ply receive and process signifiers from the Other like a “black box” since
these signifiers carry an enigma that exceeds signification—the enigma of
209
the Other’s desire with respect to which the subject’s desire is founded.
We should be careful to separate the voice from the sensory experience of
understanding phonemes; we do not listen to the voice, the voice is some-
thing that happens to us. There are certain nonsensical signifiers that invade
and resonate in the nascent subject and which cannot be integrated into
a narrative chain that would explain them. As Lacan puts it in Seminar X,
these “primordial signifiers” are “what happens when the signifier is not
only articulated, which merely presupposes its nexus, its coherence in a
chain with others, but is uttered and voiced”17—when, that is, they are shot
through with an overwhelming desire that cannot be understood. While
“[l]inguistics has accustomed us to noticing that [language] is nothing
other than a system of oppositions”—an organisation of metaphor and
metonymy—“[w]hen something from this system passes into an utter-
ance, a new dimension is involved, an isolated dimension, a dimension
unto itself, the specifically vocal dimension.”18 We can already see, dur-
ing Seminar X, Lacan beginning to distance his re-turn to Freud from the
tenets of structuralist linguistics while continuing to insist on the relevance
of topology as a corrective to the more unhelpful elements of Freud’s legacy.
Lacan’s suggestive reference to “a new” and intensely libidinal “dimen-
sion unto itself ” at odds with the linguistic system of oppositions, along
with his observation in Seminar XI that “the invocatory drive … is the
closest to the experience of the unconscious,”19 are early indications of the
later conceptualisation of lalangue, the “swarm” of S1s. It was with lin-
guistics that psychoanalysis would supposedly “hook onto science” but,
Lacan would ultimately conclude in 1975, “psychoanalysis is not a sci-
ence; it is a practice.”20 For Lacan, the difference between psychoanalytic
practice and science lay in predictability and calculability: the “effects [of
interpretation] are incalculable. It testifies to no knowledge, since to take
it in its classical definition, knowledge is insured by a possible foreseeing.
What [analysts] have to know is that there is a knowledge that does not
calculate, but that nonetheless works for jouissance.”21 The analysand’s
non-classical savoir is never universalisable because it always involves the
irreducible particularity of jouissance. Furthermore, this jouissance means
that the analyst’s voice resonates; his interpretation has an effect because
it is not understood; it is not a unit of knowledge to be metabolised
by a pupil-cum-patient. Inspired by Dupin’s spectacularly dull rumina-
tions on probability and game theory, the appendix to ‘The Seminar on
“The Purloined Letter”’ exemplified Lacan’s early hyper-rationalist and

anti-humanist project which had as its aim the theorisation of a calcu-
lable and insubstantial subject. A signifying chain mechanically unfolds
(“repetition automatism”) in accordance with a priori logical parameters
(i.e. language as a “system of oppositions”) and the barred subject of the
combinatorial exists as nothing more than a perpetual fading. Thanks
to the (re)introduction of two radically uncertain factors in the form of
the body and jouissance, “the analytical thing will not be mathematical”22
and, as such, its writing will require an incompletely mathematised and
substantial topology.
What the Borromean knot allowed Lacan to do was not only to jointly
write the structuralist “system of oppositions” and the “dimension unto
itself ” but also to topologically situate different modes of jouissance as
different modes of enjoying the object a. The obsessional, for example,
experiences “J’ouïr sens [I hear meaning]”23; the jouissance effective when
what we might clumsily call an imaginarisation of the symbolic takes
place (see Fig. 4.2). “A voice” can have “a function of modelling our
Imaginary
(corps-sistance)
anxiety
JA sens unconscious
a
symptom
inhibition
JΦ
Symbolic
(hole)
Real
(ex-sistence)
Φ
Fig. 4.2 The completed Borromean knot (We have combined some of Lacan’s
knots. See: SXXII, 17/12/74 & 14/1/75. It was not until Seminar XXIII that Lacan
began to write JȺ not JA. See: SXXIII, p. 36)
211
void,” rather than traumatically evoking it, “but … this only happens
after the desire of the Other has taken the form of a command.”24 This
is the obsessional’s solution: the enigma of the Other’s desire is resolved
by recourse to the Other’s demand, before which the desidero prostrates
himself (thereby avoiding both his own and the Other’s castration). The
Other, when it makes comprehensible demands, is a consistent whole,
there is no “vocal dimension” that might betray an incomprehensible
desire and a structural lack. The obsessional hears sense and thereby
makes sense of his jouissance.
Lest we begin to privilege jargon over structure, concept over place—
outlining the modes of jouissance without asking why the knot (and not,
say, the Möbius strip) is the structure in which jouissance is fixed—let us
return to the topology at stake.
4.2 Writing the Real

Although the vectorial structures of Lacan’s earlier surface topologies are
“doable by a pure literal algebra”—which is to say that they are properly
“mathematical things” for which no reference to an illustration or mate-
rial object is necessary and can, in an image-less text such as ‘L’étourdit’,
be unequivocally named and deployed as a sort of matheme and have
their fundamental relationships transformed through an intervention
(e.g. median cut)—there is, Lacan noted in Seminar XX, no complete
algorithm or comprehensive mathematical “theory of knots.”25 The knot
theorist must define his object; he must decide whether a closed line and
its number of crossings constitute a knot or the unknot. Can a particular
tangle be unravelled to produce a simple loop (unknot) without cutting
it? To put this in Lacanian terms: does the knot retain an irreducible ex-
sistence as that which is impossible to dissolve? As Colin Adams explains:
Certainly, if we play with a string model of the knot for a while and we do
manage to untangle it completely, it is the unknot. But what if we play
with it for two weeks and we still haven’t untangled it? It still might be the
unknot and for all we know, five more minutes of work might be enough
to untangle it. So we can’t quit.
But in fact, there is a way to decide if a given projection of a knot is the

unknot. In 1961, Wolfgang Haken came up with a foolproof procedure for
deciding whether or not a given knot is the unknot. According to his the-
ory, we should be able to give our projection of a knot to a computer, and
the computer would run the algorithm and tell us whether or not the given
knot was the unknot. Unfortunately, even though Haken came up with his
algorithm over 30 years ago, it is so complicated that no one has ever writ-
ten a computer program to implement it.26
With knots, the dominance of theoria over practice (the ability to see the
theorised object and foresee the effect of one’s act on this object) is sternly
challenged. The ideal would be that before we undertook a reading and
(re)writing of the knot, there would be a generalisable tool that would
define the object. The question of whether or not a particular knot is
the unknot is a vital question for the psychoanalyst. If “thinking-the-
Borromean-knot” gives us rather more pain that thinking about Freud’s
topography, this is partly because it does not give itself to cognisance
(imagination and abstraction) without the egoic observer getting his
hands dirty. Just as the structure of the torus is not apparent to the sub-
ject of the torus (qua Flatlander) so too does a knot only come to be read
(or written-to-be-read) in practice.
Adrian Price provides a striking depiction of the nodal clinic:
When a subject arrives in analysis, he lays out his story as a tangle of threads
… and it takes some time to start to ascertain the sites at which one can set
about tugging and threading in order to unravel things a little. But more
precisely, it’s a matter of ascertaining the points at which, occasionally,
things are best left in a tangle, because an over-eager untangling could eas-
ily unwind the strands to the point that the subject falls apart. This can
happen. The tact of the analyst is to form an idea of what can be trimmed
and sliced, and what is best left in a tangle. The analyst approaches this
tangle like the mathematician, by trying to see what the minimum number
of essential crossing points are. This gives what mathematicians call the
“minimal projection” of a knot or a link, the pared-down version devoid of
nugatory loops.27
The point here is not that a knot is some numinous real that maintains a
quixotic ex-sistence beyond numeration but that its mathematics—which
213
is to say, its fundamental relationships—can only be written after it has

been read. When Lacan avers that “[t]he mathematical approach to the
knot in topology is insufficient”28 he is not suggesting that we are in the
realm of a completely unformalisable chaos but that mathematics cannot
be complacently relied upon, that there is always a chance that a knot
might defy those expectations based on a pre-existing predictive knowl-
edge. Hence why a corollary of the knot’s rise was the matheme’s fall (and
the dissolution of a transmissible legacy).
Lacan even devoted a considerable amount of time to working out
whether it is possible to write particular knots. If it could be demonstrated
that a knot does not stop not writing itself then this might tell us some-
thing about those that are written. For example, he spent two months
racking his brains over whether or not it is possible to link together four
trefoil knots in a Borromean fashion:
Even yesterday evening, I was thinking only of managing to demonstrate

for you that it ex-sists. The worst thing was that I didn’t find the demon-
strative reason for its non-existence. I simply failed.
The fact that I’m unable to show that the knot of four trefoil knots ex-
sists, as a Borromean knot, doesn’t prove anything. I would have to dem-
onstrate that it cannot ex-sist, whereby, in that very impossibility, a real
would have been secured.29
Just as the fact that one has spent two weeks failing to untangle a knot
is not proof that it is not the unknot, so too is one’s failure to write a
Borromean link of four trefoil knots not proof that it does not exist. In
attempting to demonstrate the real as an impasse in formalisation with-
out a comprehensive formal system in place, Lacan found himself weav-
ing and unwinding rings of string, stubbornly awaiting an encounter
with “un bout de réel” that he might be able to pass on to his perplexed
audience. Whereas ‘L’étourdit’ has no images of topology—the supposi-
tion being the spatio-temporal vectors of demand, desire and the cut
had become mathemes shorn of signification—Lacan’s later seminars are
packed with scribbled knots. The same is true of the letters exchanged
between himself and a number of mathematicians. Between seminar ses-
sions various problems would be worked upon in these letters so that a
solution might be presented at the next session. Parts of the seminar thus
became a regular report on the findings of an exclusive cartel.
Lacan stumbled his way blindly through a Borromean labyrinth, mak-

ing various adjustments, reversing a crossing here, adding a ring there,
and only after learning the consequences of these acts for psychoanalysis.
In these late seminars, theoretical developments are not secondarily sum-
marised or clarified by knots; they are instead compelled by knots that
serve as a seemingly endless reserve of unexpected problems and solu-
tions. These nodal casse-têtes, like the unconscious itself or certain literary
works, provoke psychoanalysis; the latter is called upon to respond to
impasses and answers revealed by a revision made to the knot by revising
itself. Neither imaginary (like the visible cross-cap) nor simply algebraic
(like the theoretical cross-cap), the knot is not amenable to speculation;
like the symptom, it instead requires an active manipulation, a doing, a
“dealing with” that Lacan referred to as a non-classical “savoir y faire.”30
Lacan recommends that we adopt an uncomfortable intellectual stance
vis-à-vis the knot: “To operate with this knot in a suitable fashion, you
must use it stupidly. Be dupes. Do not enter this subject in obsessional
doubt … I invite you to repudiate the hypotheses, and, here, to be stupid
enough not to ask yourselves questions about the usage of my knot.”31
If, as obsessionals, we regard the knot or its writer as an Other of the
Other that will command our actions and transform the opacity of our
jouissance into sens, we will be sorely disappointed. The epistemological
attitude called for here is neither that of a doubting, hypothesising “non-
dupe” and nor is that of the blindly faithful devotee who unquestion-
ingly believes that a master knows. While Lacan’s statement appears to
corroborate the oft-aired criticism that his discourse not only inspired
but actually required uncritical fidelity, he in fact has in mind a third
attitude—that of the “good dupe,” who, rather than being the patsy
of a knowledge or a knower, has “somewhere a real of which she is the
dupe.”32 This dupe’s sex is no coincidence: to be a good dupe is to have
a relationship not with a totalised Other via an object but with S(Ⱥ).
The good dupe is the analyst or analysand, who, in order to operate with
the unconscious “in a suitable fashion,” must “repudiate the hypotheses”
and make himself its dupe, allowing his thinking to be challenged by
it: “my knot,” and, indeed, all our knots, “will not serve to go farther
than there from where it emerges, that is, analytic experience.”33 The knot
will not serve as a generalisable “model” or allow us to make hypotheses:
215
“models,” insofar as they are only said to work when anomalies have
been eradicated (when, in other words, there are no results of a repeat-
able experiment that cannot be explained or predicted by the model),
“recur to the pure imaginary. Knots recur to the real.”34 Since knots have
only been incompletely mathematised, they do not allow one to make
calculated inferences; one must read its writing in ignorance.
Indeed, the knot arrived at a point in Lacan’s work where the paternal
metaphor—which, if we give it its ‘Freudian’ title (the Oedipus com-
plex), had served as the psychoanalytic hypothesis, an apparently immuta-
ble principle of psychoanalytic theory—had been devalued as inherently
defective:
The hypothesis of the unconscious, and Freud underscores this, is some-

thing that can only hold up by presupposing the Name-of-the-Father.
Presupposing the Name-of-the-Father, which is certainly God, is how psy-
choanalysis, when it succeeds, proves that the Name-of-the-Father can just
as well be bypassed … on the condition that one makes use of it.35
It is the hypothesis from which theory proceeded: for Freud, the uncon-
scious exists because le-non-du-père (prohibition) has been stated and, for
Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language because it was founded
by the paternal metaphor. Once this obsessional hypothesis is repudiated,
the real, the symbolic and the imaginary (which will be referred to as R,
S and I from now on) are mutually entangled. The most obvious con-
sequence of Lacan’s presentation of the structural relation between his
“three” as equivalent to the structural relation between a Borromean knot’s
three rings is that there is no hierarchical order as there was in Lacan’s ear-
lier work where S (the Other), through the Name-of-the-Father’s legacy,
dominated R and I: “If there is a real Other, it is not elsewhere than in the
knot itself, and it is in this that there is no Other of the Other.”36 In this
topology, S is now an equal partner. The Name-of-the-Father, which had
served as the universal and transcendental guarantor of all that was theo-
risable about the neurotic subject, ordering RSI in terms of a normative
père-version—wherein symbolic distance (Φx) is put between the subject
and the object a that grants his fantasmatic reality an imaginary consis-
tency by obscuring the real non-existence of the sexual relationship—was
abandoned as an imaginary “model of the function”37 and its role (i.e. that
of allowing the subject to avoid the Other’s lack) was to be performed by
a fourth ring: the symptom. In Seminar XXIII, analysis is said to conclude
when the subject has identified with the sinthome—an utterly singular
symptom that is the subject’s mode of enjoying the Other’s lack (the jouis-
sance of not-all [JȺ]). The mythical model of the Name-of-the-Father (as
that which holds the Other together) is “by-passed,” while “use is made”
of the structural function of the Name-of-the-Father (as that which knots
RSI), when this responsibility is fulfilled by the sinthome. This is, to return
to how we left things at the end of Chap. 3, what Lacan meant by “lack-
ing differently.” Lorenzo Chiesa neatly articulates this distinction when he
writes that whereas “phallic jouissance (of the object a) makes the symbolic
One, increasingly pre-tending to obliterate the lack,” the not-all jouissance
(JȺ) of the sinthome “makes the individual who, as it were, develops ‘his
own’ symbolic from that lack.”38 We move, then, from an elimination of
the barred subject to a writing of the individual.
Knots appealed because Lacan was attempting to gain access to R
without a symbolism (which he had long discounted) or a mathematical/
scientific model (which he had more recently given up on). In scientific
reasoning a model functions by allowing one “to foresee what would be
the results … of the functioning of the real.”39 Science is concerned with
identifying laws or what Lacan referred to as “knowledge in the real”:
the scientific real seems to know what it must do; it works. When, dis-
tressed by Newton’s laws of gravity—which, we recall, only took on the
full weight of a subversion when written as a functioning algebra—con-
temporaries asked “[h]ow can each of these particles know how far it is
from all the others?” they “evoked the unconscious of the particle.”40 This
is, however, the automatic and calculable unconscious of Lacan’s early
structuralism, a signifying chain that mechanically unfolds in accordance
with the law (Name-of-the-Father) rather than a knot. Countering his
previous esteem for the Newtonian écrit, he notes that the question of
whether God “makes the machine work” or whether it “turn[s] by itself ”
is only a “[r]efinement of knowledge”41 rather than a subversion. The
symptom that individualises the knot is a sign that the real, following the
introduction of the signifier, is not working. Only “our analytic apprecia-
tion of what is involved in the knot”—a grasp that is neither that of the
217
s cientific non-dupe nor the religious dupe—“is the negative of religion.”42

The relinquishment of “obsessional doubt” requires great discipline but
it is not the discipline of a doubting Thomas made disciple: the writ-
ing of the knot is an attempt to produce “some folisophy … that is less
sinister than the book in the Bible known as The Book of Wisdom” which
“ground[s] wisdom on lack.”43 At the opening of this book, which has a
secondary canonicity, the author extols the stoic endurance of the righ-
teous in the face of the corporeal jouissance displayed by the ungodly and
establishes the basis for wisdom in neurotic avoidance and deferral (inso-
far as the wisdom of one’s embrace of lack will be proved after death). For
this cosmos bound by the Name-of-the-Father, Lacan substitutes Joyce’s
“folisophy”; his mad enjoyment of a composted acosmos, a litter of letters
(“where in the waste is the wisdom?”44), that amounts not to a wisdom to
live by but a jouissance to live with, a symptom of the lack of a theological
or scientific “knowledge in the real.”
In modern science, as founded on the mathematisation of nature, “[a]
ll approach to the real is woven for us by the number” because the sci-
entific real is a number: “[s]cience counts. It counts the matter, in the
matter [i.e. weight, volume, distance, etc.].” The unconscious, in its
own “approach to the real” appears to mimic this counting at its most
basic level: it is an “accountant who knows how to do addition.”45 In
the metonymy of unconscious desire, the unconscious structured like a
language, one signifier is counted and added to another signifier. It is a
savoir, a wisdom grounded on lack (i.e. the one nothing or a zero that
begins the count). However, the psychoanalytic real is not “woven for us
by” the number/signifier (symbolic), it cannot be approached in terms of
the law of the signifier or the numerical function of the successor; it is
instead disjunctively woven with the symbolic, arising as that which causes
automatic computation to go awry. The psychoanalytic “real implies the
absence of any law”46: its emergence is unforeseeable and its function-
ing is inexplicable. Replacing the symbolic automaton, the symptomatic
unconscious would make for a truly useless accountant: “it is extremely
maladroit [because] it must count in the manner of these knots” that
are irreducible to the extendable symbolic chain. The unconscious “does
not find [retrouve] itself ” in these counts; it is constantly blundering,
losing any direction or meaning. “But it is there”—there where it loses
itself—“that it is touched upon that there is at minimum a knot.”47 To
“count in the manner of these knots” is to begin with a One that is three:
“The Borromean knot consists strictly insofar as three is the minimum.”48
There is no one ringed or two ringed Borromean knot: its count begins at
three. You can of course add rings but, if just one is broken, the knot’s con-
sistence dissolves and it ceases to ex-sist: “This property”—this topological,
Borromean quality that takes precedence over quantity—“homogenises
all that there is of number after three. In the sequence of whole numbers,
1 and 2 are detached—something begins at three that includes all of the
numbers, as far as they are numerable.”49 Vitally, “the real only begins at
number three”50; its ex-sistence is established as primary to numeration’s
virtual infinity.
But how does the writing of the knot’s integral threeness “support a
real” beyond our simply appending the letter ‘R’ to one of its rings? How
is it that R can be beyond S and I without being an ineffable absolute
or ding an sich residing outside subjective structure? The knot does not
resolve this structural paradox but instead embodies it, showing us how,
if “this real … doesn’t tie on to anything”51 in terms of a symbolic chain
(present and assimilated), it is nonetheless knotted (present and eccentric).
In this peculiar structure, each ring is both separate and bound (Fig. 4.3).
What “begins at three” is not just the concept of R but, more impor-
tantly, the place of R. As ex-sistence, R can only be experienced in relation
to S and I. For example, if the third ring (we can ascribe to each ring the
position of ‘third’) ex-sists to the two others by not being directly linked, it
is nevertheless necessary for the knot’s imaginary consistence, which, in turn,
is what grants the third ring its ex-sistence (as opposed to the virtual non-
existence of an unattached theological real that floats off into the ether).
R
R
Fig. 4.3 Each ring ex-sists

219
If the knot’s constitutive, holed elements make a whole, this does not
occur in a fashion to which we are accustomed. Throughout Seminar
XXII and Seminar XXIII, Lacan presents R, S, and I not in terms of letters
secondarily affixed to the knot but as structural qualities that, together,
are the knot. The knot does not serve as an analogical map for R, S and
I, but instead is R, S and I. Since each of the rings ex-sist to the others,
each ring is real and, furthermore, since it is impossible, thanks to this
structuration of parts, that the knot’s minimum be anything other than
it is, “[t]he real that is at stake, is the knot in its entirety.”52 Since each
of the knot’s elements are circles that comprise a consistent unity that
hold together through a consistency imparted by the other two circles
in a collective structural accord, both its parts and whole are also imagi-
nary. Since each of the rings organise a hole and it is on the basis of this
incompletion that the knot is formed, the function of the symbolic is
equally present and effective.
It is only the presence of the two other rings that gives R its ex-sistence
as an immanent impasse in representation, an anomaly exposing a model’s
incompletion, rather than an always absent thing-in-itself: “The mode in
which one round of thread ex-sists to another is that with which I displace
the by itself unsolvable question of objectivity. Objectivity thus displaced
seems less silly than the noumena.”53 Two positions are argued against here:
(1) The scientific position which, with its systematising models, “has
recourse … to the imaginary to give oneself [se faire] an idea of the
real.” Riffing on the homophonic equivocation between sphère and se
faire, the conjunction of good form and conscious apprehension,
Lacan poses his topological entanglement as antithetical to the spher-
ical envelopment of R by I: “What I put forward in my Borromean
knot of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, led me to distin-
guish these three spheres and then, afterwards, re-knot them”54 in a
fashion that makes them both distinct (as ex-sistence, consistence
and the hole) and structurally interdependent. The necessary condi-
tion of this knotting—which poses the categories as neither com-
pletely separate (the pure real or ding an sich) nor reducible to the
other (“idea of the real”)—is that each of the “three spheres” are holed
(as rings). Each ring is indirectly knotted to the other by virtue of this
incompleteness. Lacan subtly shifts from a negation of a connection to

a positivised negative: while it is true to say that the real “doesn’t tie
on to anything [c’est de ne se relier à rien],” this does not mean that it
is simply separate; it is instead quite literally “tied to nothing [c’est de
se relier à rien]”55—the nothing that each ring contours. The rings are
not three Ones, three self-sufficient and stable spheres, but three
rings ex-sisting and consisting as One that derive their specificity of
function and effect from an interaction with the other categories at the
point at which they are incomplete: “The imagining of consistency
makes straight for the impossible dimension of the fracture, but it is
in this respect that a fracture can always be the real, the real as impos-
sible. It is no less compatible with the said imagining, and even con-
stitutes it.”56 In the knot, ex-sistence and consistence are not simply
separate or dichotomous but are instead structurally interdependent
because each are experienced by the subject in their relation to the
other (i.e. a rupture ruins consistency, a false consistency masks
ruptures).
(2) The philosophical (or, more precisely, Kantian) position according to
which we can have no “idea of the real”—that, once distinguished (as
phenomena and noumena), the “spheres” cannot be re-knotted.
What the Borromean knot shows, not as a representation or model
but in its logic of topos (the qualitative and non-metaphorical “real-
of-the-structure” that makes it ‘Borromean’), is that if we cannot
have a totalising “idea of the real” this does not mean that the real is
ineffable but rather that it ex-sists as this failure. The noumenal real
stands alone as a spherical totality, tautologically defined by itself.
The psychoanalytic “real is not all”57: it is as holed and in “bits” that
it interacts with the other rings. Introducing difference and lack, S
cuts a hole in R, knotting itself with R not by means of a direct con-
catenation but by striking it into ex-sistence. This is not to suggest
that R pre-exists S but that R only comes to ex-sist when S is intro-
duced. To return to a previously cited formulation, “the cry does not
stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes
the silence emerge as silence.”58 Once the cry (S) and silence (R) have
simultaneously emerged, neither can exist purely and independently.
In the words of Beckett, what results is a mutual incompetence,
221
“the inability to speak, the inability to be silent.”59 There is, in both S

and R, a hole—the inability to speak (to produce univocal and com-
pleted meaning) and the inability to be silent (to access a virginal,
lackless, pre-discursive real)—that is both the structural condition
and the result of their knotting. The real upon which discourse has
consequences is not made non-existent by representation (this is not a
matter of the letter straightforwardly killing the spirit) and nor is it
brought into existence by representation (the revealed truth of
Biblical testimony). It is as a consequence of the signifier that some-
thing does not work in R and it is as that which does not work that R
emerges: “what Freud discovered about what he called sexuality makes
a hole in the real.”60 There is no sexual relationship, no faultless union
between the subject and a totalised Other, and it is as this malfunc-
tioning that R is encountered by S and I and it is to the hole that S
creates that R is indirectly knotted. The hole of R (sexuality) is depen-
dent upon the hole of S—that is, the impossibility of saying it (all),
the impossibility of communicating desire via the discursive link
between agent and Other.
The psychoanalyst has a non-religious, non-scientific and non-

philosophical access to the real: “we can only reach odds and ends of
the real”61; the fragments that emerge in its interaction with S and I. It
was in order to support this not-all real—a real that is both holed and
ex-sistent—that Lacan wrote the knot: “my knot is… uniquely that
by which the real is introduced as such.”62 R could not be introduced
through language (S) or through an image or model (I): such attempts
supposed a real that could be represented or domesticated. However, the
question of the real’s structural place cannot be resolved by separating
it from S and I. As Lacan admits, his teaching “implies a notion of the
real … distinct from the symbolic and the imaginary. The only onerous
factor … is that, in this affair, the real makes sense, when in actual fact
… the real is grounded in that it bears no meaning.”63 Just as the source
of a signifier’s meaning lies not in itself but in its differential relation to
other signifiers, so too is R given meaning when it is defined purely by its
distinction to the other categories. In contradistinction to this conferral
of meaning through binary relations, the knot, as “that by which the real
is introduced as such,” poses a structure in which R is both a necessary

component alongside I and S (with ex-sistence, consistence and the hole
all being integral and interdependent qualities) and irreducible to I and S.
Here, Lacan anticipates the dialectical critique to which his conceptu-
alisation of the real is treated by Fredric Jameson:
[T]he moment we recognize a boundary or a limit, we are already beyond

it—calling something a limit is a way of transcending that limit towards a
plane on which the ‘limit’ itself is little more than a category and no longer
a genuine boundary. So it is that anything identified as the unassimilable
gets assimilated by virtue of this very act of identification …. [I]s not the
very fact of naming all this the real a first move towards domesticating it
and finding it a place within symbolization?64
Once it has been thought of as a distinguished or excluded element,

R is no longer genuinely unthinkable since it is defined by its distinc-
tion. The knot’s real is subject to neither inclusion nor exclusion (which,
through a quick dialectical procedure, can be made equivalent to a cer-
tain form of inclusion) but instead ex-sists. While it does not have “a
place within symbolization” it is nonetheless maladroitly knotted to sym-
bolisation—knotted by means of hole within itself and within symboli-
sation. When confronted with a real that is both integral to structure
and irreducible to structure’s other two components, Jameson’s binary
terms (i.e. “assimilated” and “unassimilable”) are no longer appropriate.
It was precisely in order to avoid Jameson’s idea of the real as a “limit”
that can be recognised and localised on a geometric “plane” that Lacan
turned to topology. A plane is two-dimensional: a binary logic operates
when closed lines are inscribed on the plane as a limit or frame. We
can distinguish between what is inside and outside the line-as-limit but
this limit and, indeed, the exteriority that it produces, become only ele-
ments in a wider set (i.e. the plane itself ). We might imagine that the
third category lies beyond the plane itself and that to access it we would
only have to tumble off the edge, suffering the fate that awaited ancient
explorers journeying to the ends of a flat earth, but this would be to
adopt another misconception that Lacan sought to avoid—that of a
massive envelopment of S and I by R as the great outdoors.
223
What makes the knot the only adequate support of the psychoanalytic
real qua ex-sistence is that its lines allow what Lacan referred to as a “ter-
nary logic”65 to function. In other words, the particular way in which the
knot is written in three dimensions, the Borromean fashion in which its
lines intertwine, accomplishes what the two-dimensional plane cannot
by supporting all three of the dimensions (without incorporating one
into the other or excluding one) that comprise the psychoanalytic sub-
ject: “the real cannot be just one of those rings of string. It’s the way of
presenting them in their linked-up knot that, in and of itself, forms the
real of the knot.”66 The writing of the knot, Lacan frequently argued in
these final seminars, amounts not to a negative demonstration of the real
as an incompletion of, or inconsistency in, a signifying matrix—if mod-
elling is a matter for the imaginary, then “demonstrating is a matter for
the symbolic”67—but a monstration of the real, supporting its ex-sistence
with a surety that surpasses the pyrrhic success-through-failure achieved
by the demonstration of our inability to localise a twist or to write the
smallest whole number not written on the board.
The knot does not partake in the binary logic that characterises the spa-
tial intuition beloved by the ego (i.e. the binary opposition between inte-
rior and exterior) and which runs through language itself (i.e. R is “given
meaning” by being defined as that which is not S or I). “Language”—and,
indeed, the two-dimensional plane upon which Jameson bases his argu-
ment—“is always flattened out.”68 It reduces the three dimensions of RSI to
two dimensions—a dualism, dichotomy, dialectic or metaphoric substitu-
tion that confers meaning—“and that indeed is why my twisted business of
the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, with the fact that the symbolic,”
or any other category, “is what goes above what is above and which passes
beneath what is beneath, … [has] value” (Fig. 4.4).69
It is this “twisted business” of the Borromean knot that allows a real to
be written that is irreducible to the options offered by a binary opposi-
tion. This real ex-sists as both included and excluded because the knot in
which the “function of the at-least-three” is operative cannot be flattened.
Its lines cannot be inscribed on a two-dimensional plane and it forces
us to construct unwieldy formulations: the first ring that is beneath the
second ring is above the third ring that is above the second ring that the
first ring is beneath.
Fig. 4.4 The knot’s ternary logic
***
The knot forces us to think in a Borromean fashion, to keep in mind
the structurally interdependent relation between the three categories, the
three dimensions or dit-mensions (i.e. S and two others that are affected
by their being tied by means of the S’s hole). In Seminar XXIV Lacan
remarks that, as dit-mensions, S produces only mi-dit truths, the “imagi-
nary … is always wrong” and “the real tells the truth, but it does not
speak.”70 This is not to suggest that R and I are simply discursive, just as
they are not simply beyond or primary to discourse, but that this is how
they are discursively manifested or experienced:
(1) S+I: the totalisation of what has been said as the whole truth (which
is “always wrong” because the universe of discourse is not a closed set).
(2) S+R: this dimension is “the space of a lapsus,” or l’une-bévue.
What the Borromean knot forces us to recognise is that S is not the sole
base layer to which the other categories are added or the inalienable prism
through which they are viewed. For example, we must also consider how
S and I operate with respect to R:
(1) R+I: this is the Edenic ideal of pre-discursive, unified nature, an ideal
to which the speaking subject has no access (Fiat lux).
(2) R+S: S introduces lack and “difference as such” into the former
(Fiat trou).
225
It is legitimate to note a further Borromean sophistication and redou-

ble the trinity. For example, with respect to R, S can have multiple and
diverse effects:
(1) The imaginarily symbolic: a geometric surveying or scientific modeli-

sation of R.
(2) The symbolically symbolic: the endless displacement of the real by
the metonymic chain.
(3) The really symbolic: the discourse (be it a physicist’s écrit or an ana-
lyst’s intervention) that profoundly transforms the real.
This could also be considered in terms of naming, where R+S(I) is the

perfect representation of the referent (e.g. ‘Spot the Dog’), R+S(S) is the
complete alienation of the subject at the hands of the signifier (e.g. pris-
oner no. 5290) and R+S(R) is the name that radically alters the named
(e.g. being referred to as a blunderer (étourdi) during the early stages of
symbolic maturation could conceivably have determinative effects on the
desirous subject). The extraordinary richness of this Borromean archi-
tecture allowed Lacan to speak with a new clarity about the interactions
of his categories and the effects of such entanglements—a conceptual
complexity derived from a startlingly simple composite of topological
relations and qualities.
***
If Lacan managed to renew the scandal of Freud’s articulation (“what
he called sexuality…”) by topologising it (“…makes a hole in the real”)—
by, that is, presenting Freud’s naming of the incurable as an incomplete-
ness upon which the formation of structure depends—his nodal writing also
allowed him to reinvigorate some of his own formulae such as “il n’y a pas
de rapport sexuel.” Even this drastic expression was to be disowned because
the real that it was supposed to carry as the expression of an impossibility
was at risk of being betrayed by the binary logic of language: “I’m trying
to offer you an odd or end of the real with respect to where we are … I tell
you in this respect that there is no sexual relation, but this is embroidery
[broderie] because it partakes of the yea or nay.”71 If we might be tempted
to vaguely refer to the real (of sexuality) as an obscurity we should, argues
Lacan in a distinctively Borromean formulation, be aware that the word
“obscure is but a metaphor here, because were we to have an odd or

end [bout] of the real, we would know that light is no more obscure
than shade, and vice versa.”72 This statement jars with our expectations:
we anticipate the dull profundity of an amateur poet or dialectician—
that shadows are no more obscure than light—and instead find that the
sense has been given a further disorientating twist. This dissolution of the
linguistic binary beyond mere reversal, such that the couple (light and
shadow) no longer exist solely through their capacity to signify but also
come to exist through their failure to make sense, is induced by the intru-
sion of a third dimension (“if we had an odd or end of the real…”). R, as
that which cannot be adequately conceptualised as an obscurity, a beyond
or a limit, ex-sists through its effects on S and I; its emergence ruptures
the imaginary consistency of symbolic reality, constituting it as holed at
the moment of knotting.
But why is the statement that there is no sexual relationship an
embroidery? Embroidery is decorative; thread passes directly through fab-
ric’s holes in order to produce a flat surface. The terms of ‘L’étourdit’
are relevant here: the toric relationship constitutes a “surface-fiction” as
the Other’s demand passes directly through the hole of the obsessional’s
desire and the hysteric’s demand to pass directly through the hole of the
Other’s desire. Lacan repeats his assertion that “the evident [l’évidence] is
ratified by the emptying [l’évidement]”—that the aspherical acosmos of
the non-relationship must be cut from the “surface-fiction”—on multiple
occasions in his last seminars (for example: “the evident [l’évidence] …
depends on this emptying [évidement]”73). Such an emptying must make
evident the empty (vide) hole that is plugged by the Other’s/hysteric’s
demand. In Seminar XXII, reference to the knot, whose rings do not link
directly but instead disjunctively turn around one another by means of
a third (love’s overlapping of two lacks does not make a directly linked
chain), allowed Lacan to make a subtle transition from stating that the
sexual relationship does not exist and that this non-existence is written
by his logic of sexuation (“impasse in formalisation”) or there exists a
neurotic relationship and this relationship is written by the toric inter-
twining (“surface-fiction”) to there exists a sexual non-relationship that is
written by the knot: “A topology is what permits us to grasp how ele-
ments that are not knotted two by two”—that is, not embroidered as a
227
toric relationship—“can nonetheless make a knot … It is in this that

the term sexual non-rapport can be supported in a sayable fashion.”74
It is not that the relationship is non-existent (this would partake in the
binary of “yea or nay” that could be subjected to a dialectical procedure)
but that it ex-sists as impossible and this is why it troubles us.75 Lacan is
neither asserting the existence of the relationship (torus) nor the non-
existence of the relationship (logic of sexuation) but the ex-sistence of a
non-relationship (knot). Each ring does not “pass through the hole of the
other”; it only “play[s] in the hole of the other,”76 doing just enough to
verify this hole without making it the support of an embroidery. Because
of the “ function of at-least-three,” the knot’s hole is not used as the sup-
port of a relationship and instead supports a non-relationship.
In the years following the presentation of the knot as a writing of the
non-relationship, a series of what Guy Le Gaufey refers to as “writing-
events”77 takes place as Lacan, with the help of attendant mathematicians
(Soury and Thomé), sets about attempting to prove that there is only a
single three-ringed Borromean knot—that, in other words, the existence
of the sexual non-relationship has an unequivocal written support just as
there was only one way of writing the non-existence of the sexual rela-
tionship (i.e. the logic of sexuation). Lacan, oscillating between unease
as he indicates a potential pitfall and relief as Soury and Thomé resolve
it, abandons the fate of psychoanalytic axioms to a trial by experimenta-
tion with rings of string. What if one were to write two knots, colour
their rings blue, red and green and with both knots put these colours in
a different order? No, reply Soury and Thomé, it is still possible, using
all the deforming actions open to a topologist, to reduce one knot to
the other. And if one were to give the rings of one knot a dextrogyratory
(clockwise) orientation and the rings of the other knot a laevogyratory
(counter-clockwise) orientation? Again Lacan is reassured, by a sketched
demonstration that he handed round his audience, that, providing one
is operating with the knot in three-dimensional space, “there is only one
oriented Borromean knot.”78
At the same time that it supported the possibility of writing the non-
relationship, this discovery closed off a potentially productive avenue that
Lacan had briefly begun to explore in Seminar XXI. Three configurations
arise from each oriented knot: RIS, ISR and SRI from the dextrogyratory
knot and RSI, SIR and IRS from the laevogyratory knot (see Fig. 4.5).
Inviting comparisons with his four discourses, Lacan identifies two of the
three “laevogyratory discourses”79—religious discourse (RSI) and math-
ematical discourse (IRS). The former “produces [réalise] the symbolic
from the imaginary. It makes symbols real.” Religious discourse realises
the Other of law and ritual from an imaginary cosmology. Mathematical
discourse “imagines that there might be a real of the symbolic. It is legiti-
mate for you to imagine … if the real remains before [the symbolic].”
Here, imagining doesn’t seem to have the usual deprecatory connota-
tions; rather than being an idealisation, it is more like a first conception,
appreciation or inspiration, a “noticing [of ] the fact that there is some
real in the symbolic.” Having emptied the symbolic of imaginary signi-
fication, mathematical discourse consists of letters that inscribe the real
of incompleteness and inconsistency. Psychoanalysis, in “spreading the
mathematical procedure,”80 also emerges from this configuration (IRS).
Unlike the four discourses, which all belong to the same turning circle,
the dextrogyratory and laevogyratory discourses would (if there were
indeed two oriented knots) be strictly distinct. We shall leave the reader
to form their own conclusion regarding Lacan’s suggestion that psycho-
analysis and religion belong to the same orientation!
Lacan’s efforts to grant his new aphorism its topology, to give it the
support of a writing, ultimately ended in failure. One can indeed write
two distinct Borromean knots that are irreducible to each other on the
conditions that (1) the rings are given different colours, (2) the same ring
in both knots is given the same colour and the same orientation, (3) the
R R
S I S I
Fig. 4.5 Orienting the Borromean knot (See: SXXI: 13/11/73, 14/5/74 &
21/5/74. SXXII, 11/3/75)
229
two other coloured rings, by virtue of being written as infinite straight

lines, are not given an orientation and (4) the two knots are distinguished
by the fact that the differently coloured infinite lines have swapped posi-
tion (so that the blue line in the first knot goes under the oriented ring
and over the green line and the blue line in the second knot goes over
the oriented ring and under the green line).81 This rather cumbersome
explanation is a testament to just how far Lacan and his fellow explorers
went in mapping out the “planet Borromeo.”
Despite the fact that the myth of the binary couple lurks in the struc-
ture of the Borromean knot and that, in Seminar XXVI, Lacan dejectedly
admits that the existence of the sexual non-relationship cannot be con-
firmed by a writing—noting that “there is no sexual relationship, [this]
is what is essential in what I state”82—we should not seize on this late
concession as an opportunity to absolve ourselves of the responsibility
to investigate and account for the Borromean years—most obviously
because Lacan used as the support of another vital concept (the sinthome)
a four ringed knot. Besides being exemplary of Lacan’s intellectual rigour,
his refusal to be satisfied with merely assuming that there is only one
Borromean knot, this episode also reveals much about the extent to which
topology had become one of his most important points of reference when
it came to developing psychoanalytic theory. Put simply, if a concept’s
fundamental relations (topology) could not be formalised, if the concept
could not be written, then the concept was to be ditched. Topology qua
structure was not a secondary representation of developments, it was the
very source and guarantor of developments.
***
The Borromean knot allowed—or should we say forced?—Lacan to
rethink and restructure many of his earlier concepts. For example, if love
had previously considered to be largely an affair of the imaginary—as a
matter of the ego’s narcissistic self-love or the ideal of a two united in one-
ness—in Seminar XXI it was given a Borromean organisation and three
distinct modes, with each mode having a place in history. Once again,
the numericity unique to the knot is integral to Lacan’s presentation.
While in a chain of directly linked rings (known to mathematicians as a
Hopf link) and, indeed, in humanity’s metaphorical usage of the knot in
referring to love (i.e. the exchange of rings, “tying the knot,” etc.) only
one ring takes on the function of the middle component that binds the
two others together, in the Borromean knot each ring takes on this func-
tion (Fig. 4.6).
In the context of this discussion about love, Lacan gives each of his
categories a particular force or manifestation: I = the consistency of the
(ego’s) body, S = a knowledge or speech that “supports jouissance”83 and
R = death. The specificity of love will depend upon which category acts
as the middle ring supporting a non-relationship between the other two
rings. In Christian or “divine love,” S ties together death and the body.
A signifying commandment (S) regulates jouissance and demands that
one universalise one’s narcissistic self-love (I)—to love thy neighbour as
thyself—in order to reconcile the contradiction between the consistency
of the body (I) and death (R) in an eternal after-life. According to Lacan,
“divine love” replaced a more “ancient order” in which I bound together
jouissant knowledge and death. In Seminar VII, he had cited the poetic
culture of courtly love as an example of sublimation, noting that the
subject’s desire is sustained and an encounter with the Other’s lack is
avoided when an unattainable object, such as a Lady whom the knight
reverentially courts, takes the place of das Ding in structure.84 Referring
again to what courtly love “imagines about enjoyment and about death”85
in Seminar XXI, Lacan cites the works of the Roman poet Catullus as
evidence for his thesis that this “ancient order” preceded Christian love.
In one of his more renowned poems (‘Catallus 5’) written about his
lover, Lesbia—who is widely considered to be a literary pseudonym for
body (I) death (R)
knowledge/ jouissance (S)
Fig. 4.6 Love and the Borromean knot

231
the already married and thus unattainable Clodia—the poet makes no

attempt to produce the reconciliation between the body and death that
divine love promises and writes instead of the necessity of enjoying the
brief light of the lovers’ life before perpetual night wrenches them apart.
Death and the artist’s signifying chain that supports jouissance are knot-
ted by the body whose mortality gives love its urgency and pathos. “The
imaginary taken as middle,” argues Lacan, “is the foundation of the true
place of love”86 and if this particular Borromean ordering is the “ancient
order” this is probably because it is the default order for the neurotic
subject of the signifier. Interestingly, Lacan finds a place for psychoanaly-
sis itself in this topology; arguing that if “the true place of love” is “the
relationship of the real to knowledge” then “psychoanalysis is a means
[moyen]”—Lacan is here playing on the double meaning of moyen as both
the means and the middle (of the knot)—because “it holds itself at the
place of love.”87 In other words, the analyst qua object a must cause the
analysand’s desire rather than direct it. Needless to say, a poorly executed
analysis could very easily result in divine love.
Finally, if divine love challenged and, for many subjects, replaced the
“ancient order” of love by commanding the desire that had previously
ex-sisted in the metonymy of the lover’s signifiers, desire would often
find a different vehicle: masochistic love. Here, death binds the body and
an unconscious knowledge that supports jouissance. This is the perverse
off-shoot of the religious desire for a death that will finally deliver the
jouissance denied to the corporeal body. In the Borromean seminars, con-
ceptual experimentation and development moved very fast: as we shall
see, in the following year’s seminar, Lacan located jouissance not in a ring
(S) but in the holes that the rings create.
Love’s knot can suffer lapses in its construction: “starting from a certain
badly chosen point, there is no means of getting out. All of this means
that everyone weaves his own knot.”88 In illustrating his point Lacan
made use of a particular presentation of the knot that would feature heav-
ily in his final seminars: the braid.89 He gives an example of a Borromean
braid that has been closed prematurely. To weave a Borromean knot, the
total number of crossings must be six or a multiple thereof (Fig. 4.7):
In the first knot, R and unconscious knowledge (S) are not dis-
tinct; they are the same ring. The clinical import of an early closure
1 2 3 1/3
2
3 2 1
1 2 3 1
3 2
1 2 3
Fig. 4.7 Braids
(three c rossings) and a timely closure (six crossings) is not made imme-
diately clear by Lacan’s commentary, but two important points can be
taken from this brief aside. Firstly, braids open the way for a vast number
of (not necessarily Borromean) combinatorials. Secondly, the knot is not
an a priori arrangement that precedes its weaving in transference.
4.3 La matière as l’âme à tiers

Towards the end of his life Lacan frequently spoke of psychoanalysis in
less than favourable terms. His principle concern was that if R is con-
sidered to be absolutely distinct from S then it is difficult to see how the
latter (in which, and with which, the psychoanalyst works) can in the
course of analysis affect the former. How, if R is beyond discourse, can
the analyst effectively operate? With respect to this problem, how might
the knot help analysts “find their way in their practice”? In a lecture given
in 1977, Lacan sounded his most provocatively pessimistic note:
233
The real is in extreme opposition to our practice. It is … a limit idea of what

has no sense. Sense is what we operate with in our practice … The real is
this vanishing point … Our practice is a swindle [escroquerie], at least con-
sidered beginning from the moment we start from this vanishing point.90
This is a naive, pre-Borromean real, thought in terms of a dichotomy

(“opposition”), a geometric boundary (“limit”) or an interminably
deferred finality (“vanishing point”). Lacan’s final sentence is vital: it
is only when the real is thought of in these terms that psychoanalysis
begins to look like a swindle. He had, in the previous month’s seminar,
announced in a deceptively forthright fashion that “[a]nything that is not
founded on matter is a fraud [escroquerie]” before allaying fears that he
was readying a late career move into neuroscience by adding that if “peo-
ple want to identify [the real] with la matière” then the latter should be
written as “l’âme à tiers.”91 The homophonic resonances of this untrans-
latable neologism combine the transcendence of the soul (l’âme) and mat-
ter (matière) by means of a third reference that is threeness itself (tiers). If,
in his earlier work, Lacan had endeavoured to articulate why a practice
devoted to I at the expense of S was a fraud (ego psychology) before argu-
ing that a practice devoted to S at the expense of R would be interminable
and ineffective, he now argued that it should be founded on R as “l’âme à
tiers.” How exactly does this Borromean materialism come to be written?
***
In an effort to avoid a naive materialism or a substantivist ontology,
Lacan had in earlier works equated the existence of the barred subject
with the activity of fading. Its appearance as a spoken or speaking being
was simultaneous with its disappearance behind the articulated signifier.
The dynamic that characterises the signifying chain is that of “incessant
sliding [glissement].”92 Thanks to the bar that separates the signifier from
the signified that slides under it (S/s), signification is fluid and unstable.
Such is the fate of the subject as that which one signifier represents for
another signifier. At this point in Lacan’s work, jouissance, as that which is
prohibited by the effect of S on R, was unequivocally excluded from the
castrated subject’s topos because R was considered to be beyond S. There
was no place in the chain’s endless metonymic glissement for anything
so substantial and indivisible as the absolute jouissance of an ontologi-

cal unity that is supposed (wrongly, because it never existed in the first
place) to have been lost following the accession to symbolic subjectiv-
ity. However, by Seminar XX Lacan was able to declare that “[s]tructure
… demonstrates nothing if not that it is of the same text as jouissance,
insofar as, in marking by what distance jouissance misses—the jouissance
that would be in question if ‘that were it’—structure does not presuppose
merely the jouissance that would be it, it also props up another.”93 Lacan’s
aside—“if ‘that were it’”—is a reference to an aphorism discussed in the
last Chapter: “I demand that you refuse what I am offering you because:
it is not that.” There are, in other words, other modes of jouissance acces-
sible to the subject that are not that of an ideal (re)union with the non-
barred (m)Other (“that”).
These modes of jouissance are supported by the knot—a structure in
which both S and R function—rather than the chain. Building on his
demonstration in Seminar XIX of how the object a arises from a knot
(see Chap. 3, section 3)—a demonstration that is to be taken as a reread-
ing of his earlier thesis about how a deferred meaning effect arises from
a chain—Lacan devoted several sessions of Seminar XXII and Seminar
XXIII to an examination of the three modes of enjoying the object a that
the knot “props up.” It is vital to note that these three modes of enjoying
the object a—J’ouïr sens or jouis-sens (the enjoyment of meaning), phal-
lic jouissance (the enjoyment of an object denied by castration) and the
jouissance of the barred Other (“lacking differently”)—are three modes of
missing the object. The object ex-sists to each of these modes (see Fig. 4.2).
The knot offered a greater specificity than the cross-cap because it has
seven “hole-points”: the holes in the categories themselves that are
simultaneously the consequence and pre-requisite of a knotting, the
three holes created by the junction of two rings that are knotted by a
third and the fundamental hole occupied by the object a. Of course,
every single hole owes its constitution and irreducibility to the knot-
ting. Before we examine the concepts we must first ask how the topol-
ogy supports them.
If the dynamic that characterises the signifying chain is sliding (glisse-
ment), the dynamic that characterises the knot is that of wedging:
235
[T]here are several ways to approach space.

Being captivated by the notion of dimensions, that is, by cuts, is the
characterology of a saw technique. It is even reflected in the notion of the
point, for the fact that it qualifies as one that which has … zero dimen-
sions—that is, that which doesn’t exist.
On the basis, on the contrary, of rings of string, a wedging [coincage]
occurs, since it is the crossing of two continuities that stops a third conti-
nuity. Doesn’t it seem that this wedging could constitute the initial phe-
nomenon of a topology?94
The “saw technique” to which Lacan opposes his Borromean “wedg-

ing” is that of Euclidean geometry: a point is constituted when two
one-dimensional lines “saw,” or intersect with, each other. However, this
point, since it has zero dimensions, doesn’t exist or ‘exists’ only as an
abstract mathematical idea or a philosophical ideal (the unitary cogito).
The perceptual ego is “captivated” by the notion that it occupies the focal
point toward which lines converge. The challenge that the knot was called
to answer was that of situating and “wedging” an irreducible topos that is
not an imaginary point. The knot is distinct not only from an imaginary
geometry that fixes points but also from the Möbian lines without points.
In ‘L’étourdit’, the neurotic’s suffering is resolved by the evidence (pro-
vided by the interpretative cut) of fantasy’s asphericity and “the stability
of the flattening of the phallus, in other words of the [Möbius] strip,
where analysis finds its end.”95 When the phallus is recognised not as an
object possessed by an agent of, and exception to, castration (∃x ¬Φx)
who supports a bounded and universal Other (∀x Φx), but as an inescap-
able function that the desidero cannot evade (¬∃x ¬Φx), we return to the
barred subject of the Möbius strip, albeit one that is freed from any delu-
sional or debilitating identificatory fixation with a master-signifier or an
object (¬∀x Φx). What is missing, however, is the topos of the jouissance
at stake in the act of “lacking differently.”
Therefore, the knot must ally the glissement of the Möbian chain—it
still remains the case that there is no exception to castration—with a
wedging of jouissance. In Seminar XXIII Lacan refers to the Borromean
knot as a “linknot [chaînoeud].”96 This is partly an acknowledgement of
mathematical terminology—technically speaking, the Borromean knot
is not a knot at all because it has more than one component and should
therefore be referred to as a Brunnian link97—but also an indication that
the shift from the topology of the signifier (chain) to the topology of
jouissance (knot) is not an absolute severance. Furthermore, we might say
that the chaînoeud is underwritten by the trefoil knot that emerges when
a suture is made at three points (Fig. 4.8):
In the trefoil knot RSI are continuous with each other—a structure
that Lacan associates with paranoia. A contingent element emerges not
from the Other but from R and insists as a non-signifying signifier (S) that
eventually becomes the foundation for a consistent paranoiac knowledge
and signification (I). The paranoiac’s delusional embroidery of meaning
may have its own internal logic and reason, to which the subject is highly
attached, but its original stitch is meaningless.
The knot only wedges the three modes of jouissance that are distinct
from “the jouissance that would be in question if ‘that were it’” by means
of a familiar dynamic: “You know the Euclidean definition of the point
as the intersection between two straight lines. Isn’t there [in the writ-
ing of the knot] … something that sins [pèche] here? For what prevents
these two lines from sliding [glisser] over one another?”98 Lacan’s use of
the word “sin” is clearly designed to remind us of “[the] sin [le péché] …
the trespass of the original sin [la première faute]”99 of castration. Lacan’s
use of the terms glissement and péché to describe what occurs in both the
signifying chain and the knot invites us to discern the (dis)continuity
between the two. The chaînoeud accomplishes something more than the
“incessant glissement” that defines the signifying chain and plagues the
R+I S+R
I S
I+S
Fig. 4.8 The trefoil knot (See: SXX, p. 123. SXXIII, pp. 31, 33, 44, 58, 71–72,
75, 80–83 & 89. SXXV, 14/3/78, 18/4/78 & 9/5/78)
237
barred, castrated subject that fades under it: by sliding over one another
the “lines” “realise the essence of the Borromean knot … determining,
gripping, a point”100—the holes that are created and demarcated by the
particular way in which the rings are linked. The glissment is not that of
an interminable, post-structuralist indeterminacy: a point that is quite
different to the ideic Euclidean point is wedged by this dynamic that
is caused by the knot’s original sin (i.e. the failure of RSI to intersect
and produce an immaculate ontological point): “the Borromean link
[chaîne] … does slide [glisse] towards the knot.”101
Lacan’s apparent reliance here on the lexicon of Euclidean geometry
(i.e. the “lines” that grip “a point”) is not to be taken seriously. Indeed,
he frequently referred to these circular lines with which one writes the
chaînoeud as tori, emphasising that they are qualitatively defined by a hole
that resists quantitative deformation to a point. If, to recall Lacan’s por-
trayal of the Euclidean “saw technique,” a point is “that which doesn’t
exist,” the knot is that which continues to ex-sist in its resistance to reduc-
tion. As lines that slip over one another and wedge irreducible holes, the
knot’s components have a materiality that the Euclidean line does not: “In
this … geometry of weaving (which has nothing to do with Greek geom-
etry, which is made of nothing but abstractions), what I try to articulate
is a geometry that resists.”102 Here, however, we should recall the primary
real of the knot from which the real resistance of its whole and parts is
secondarily derived: it is impossible that the knot be made with anything
less than three rings. This is the “function of the at-least-three.” Without
three rings, there is no knot and no resistance. The rings of R, S and I only
subsist through their effect on one another, their resistance to one another:
The fact that the first two [rings] are loose from one another—this is the
very definition of the Borromean knot—enables me to sustain the ex-
sistence of the third, that of the real, in relation to the free-roaming imagi-
nary and symbolic. In sisting outside the imaginary and the symbolic, the
real butts into, plays into, something that is of the order of limitation.
Once it has been tied to the other two in Borromean fashion, from that
moment forth the two others resist it. This is a way of saying that the real
only enjoys ex-sistence to the extent that it encounters, with the symbolic
and the imaginary, a point of arrest.
… [Furthermore,] you have to say the same of the other two.103
The consequence of this mutual resistance is that no one ring can domi-
nate the others and no one ring can absent itself from the structure of
which the others are a part. The “function of at-least-three” is pertinent
to both Lacan’s categories and the rings that formalise their structural
relation. The categories are not experienced by the subject in isolation.
Similarly, in the Borromean architecture, a circle only becomes a torus
when it is knotted to another two tori that resist it. If “[t]his geometry is
not imaginary” but “a geometry of the real, of rings of string,”104 the real
at stake here is not simply that of the rings themselves, inasmuch as they
are ‘real things’ that possess an irreducible materiality that lines do not,
but what the materiality conferred by nodality (la matière as ‘l’âme à tiers’)
makes impossible. The ring’s resistant materiality does not precede nodal-
ity; it is the latter that constitutes the former. Similarly, the categories
(RSI) do not pre-exist one another but only function in their interaction
with one another (as ex-sistence, consistence and the hole).
Suppose we observe this logic (according to which materiality is a con-
sequence of nodality) and attempt to draw the first component of this
“geometry of the real.” This would be a single circle, an immaterial, one-
dimensional line reducible to a point. Having no ex-sistence or hole,
this imaginary figure is liable to vanish. Suppose we now draw a second
circle that sits atop the first. Whilst we would be forced to include a
break in one of the lines in order to show how the second line passes over
it, thereby inferring three-dimensional depth, there is no reason for our
“free-roaming” circles to be where they are, there is nothing resisting their
movement and preventing them from becoming circles in solitude. Now
suppose that we produce a writing in which the “function of the at-least-
three” is operative. Since three is the minimum, we do not go one, two,
three but instead begin with a Borromean triunity. Suddenly, our feeble
circles have been lent body, not in and of themselves but through their
topological entanglement: they knock against each other, each providing
material resistance to the other’s movement. Furthermore, the holes that
they materially wedge as a consequence of this resistance are now irreduc-
ible, having previously completely failed to manifest themselves in the flat
circles. “[T]he real,” in both its guises as an ex-sistent ring and the impos-
sibility of closure through reduction, “only begins at number three.”105
This is the mathematics of the Brunnian link: remove one link and you
are left with two unknots.
239
This Borromean materialism also provides the most apposite formalisa-

tion of the “body” as that which “only enters into the analytic perspec-
tive inasmuch as it makes an orifice, and is knotted to some symbolic or
real.”106 As neither a point nor an enclosed sphere with a clearly defined
interior and exterior (unlike Freud’s topography), the psychoanalytic
body’s qualitative structural feature is the hole (of the mouth, anus, eye
or ear) that derives jouissance from an object that covers over the real lack
in S to which this body is knotted. In Lacan’s terminology the material
“ring of string” became the visceral “gut-torus [tore-boyeau]”107 but, once
again, this was not an appeal to an unvarnished nature that exists beyond
or prior to discourse: the “gut-torus”—essentially defined by the hole that
is both the consequence and the condition of its being knotted—“is not a body
all alone. If not for the symbolic, and the ex-sistence of the real, the body
would have no aesthetic at all, because there would be no gut-torus. The
gut-torus … is made from this non-existent relation between the symbolic
and the real.”108 The non-relationship between S and R (as two rings that
do not directly link) is most keenly felt following the event that serves as
the desidero’s ‘cause’—the traumatic missed encounter with das Ding, that
is, the real lack in the Other that manifests itself in the Other’s desire.
This encounter is always missed, thereby retaining its traumatic quality,
precisely because the real that it presents cannot be made legible or articu-
lable (i.e. the envelopment of R by S). The body that “is made from this
non-existent relation” between S and R is not the body that the ego—con-
stituted when the infant jubilantly experiences a mastery over a consistent
and coherent body during the Mirror Stage—imagines itself to have.
Let us take, for example, the invocatory drive mentioned in our discus-
sion of Freud’s topography above (“If the desire of the subject is founded on
the desire of the Other … [t]he voice is … the instrument in which there
is manifested the desire of the Other.”). When topos and logos combine,
with the latter introducing the place of an incomprehensible ex-sistence
that it cannot subsequently expunge, the space of the body is not that of
a self-contained bubble: the corporeal “parlêtre” suffers from topological
extimacy as a voice escapes his interiority, exceeding conscious ownership,
and another, radically foreign voice conditions his desire. The body does
not pre-exist this encounter; it is instead constituted (as holed) by being knot-
ted to the indirectly linked S and R. The irreducible hole is both the means
by which the “gut-torus” is knotted and that which is constituted by the

knotting. To put it another way, a voice invades the ear but it is only then
that the body is experienced as holed and as a jouissant substance. With
the formation of the consistent knot, the ideal of imaginary consistence
is replaced by a “[m]aterial [that] presents itself to us as corps-sistance,”109
a consistence founded on a corporeal hole. In reference to his nodal re-
writing of transcendental aesthetics, Lacan notes that “the aesthetic, in
other words, what you feel, is not in itself transcendental. The aesthetic is
tied to what is only a contingency … [I]t is this topology that is the right
one for a body.”110 What the subject “feel[s]”—what resonates in a toric
body that is sensitive to contingent and material signifiers and not secured
by the a priori, transcendental forms of “inner sense” (time) and “outer
sense” (space)—is the jouissance that is the effect of the non-relationship
between S and R to which the body is tied.
Just as the rings ex-sist to each other, so too does each mode of jouis-
sance ex-sist to the ring that is not involved in the conjunction that pro-
duces its hole. For example (see Fig. 4.2) phallic jouissance (JΦ) occupies
the hole wedged by the overlapping of R and S and, as such, ex-sists to I
(but, of course, it would have no means of existing as wedged if I, instead
of binding R and S, was completely absent). This jouissance, as the mea-
gre compensation for the accession to subjectivity through the castration
instituted by the phallic signifier, ex-sists “outside the body, as a parasite
on the sexual organs.”111 As Lacan makes clear, “phallic jouissance is cer-
tainly not penile jouissance.”112 For the subject of the signifier, there is no
natural instinct or genital drive; there is only repetition and dérive.
4.4 The Knot’s Iconoclasm

In distancing his nodal aesthetic from the closed cosmos of the ego, Lacan
compares the “writing-event” of the Borromean knot’s unholy trinity to
the imaginary symbolism of “the sphere and the cross” (Fig. 4.9).113
The lines of the cross intersect to produce a point that is the cen-
tre of a sphere that contains it. When the lines are extended, the good
form of the sphere becomes a hole that, rather than containing these
lines, is instead knotted to them. The lines glisse over each other—this
241
Fig. 4.9 From the sphere and the cross to the Borromean knot (See: SXXII,
8/4/75)
being the sin at the heart of this heretical cross’s writing—and Lacan
pertinently writes them as infinite lines. Recall here his indication that
“in my knot the real features constantly as a straight line stretching to
infinity, i.e. the unclosed circle that it presupposes. This is what upholds
the fact that it can only be admitted as not-all.” Such a knot “ought to
be called projective”114 insofar as its tying relies upon the same actual
infinity that structures the asphere of the projective plane. The lines of
the theological cross not only sin by slipping and turning the set that
enclosed them into a hole, they also introduce an infinity that is not
that of the masculine indefinite extension—that is, a potential infinity
thought of in terms of finite and metric steps—and thereby rupture the
bounded theological cosmos. With the projective knot we return here
to the structural paradox introduced in Chap. 1: the consistency of the
knot is established at a point of ex-sistence: “the infinite straight line …
is equivalent, at least as far as the link is concerned, to a circle when the
line is completed by [Desargues’s] point at infinity.”115 In the Borromean
knot the infinite straight line and the circle are equivalent insofar as they
fulfill the same topological function. This amounts to what Lacan called
“a new imaginary”116—a consistency that, rather than being founded
(or feigned) through the jettisoning of the ex-sistence that is the real
and the hole that is introduced by the symbolic, is instead derived from
ex-sistence and the hole. It is a new cosmology that is founded on the
knot rather than the Innenwelt and Umwelt of the sphere and the inter-
sectional point of the cross. Famously, it was Joyce’s ego that provided
Lacan with a singular exemplar of this “new imaginary.”
In other presentations of the knot Lacan compares it to the arrange-

ment of the armillary sphere—an astronomical model that represents the
interaction of the circles of the pre-modern celestial sphere.
In the three dimensions of the knot the coherent space of containment
is ruined by the ex-sistence of the third ring: “In this third dimension, as
it were, the Borromean knot consists in this relationship which means that
what is enveloped with respect to one of the circles finds itself enveloping
with respect to the other one.”117 The imaginary of the knot—that is, its
consistency—is derived not from the demarcation of inside and outside
but from extimacy. Each ring is inside the ring that is inside the ring that
the ‘first’ ring is outside of. No one ring acts as the enveloping, final frame
containing the other rings just as no one ring has the privilege of being the
first term. Lacan was attempting to “support by the Borromean knot some-
thing which, certainly, is not a definition of the subject … of a universe.”118
There was a certain iconoclastic quality to the knot that Lacan energeti-
cally exploited—deploying it against those subjective spaces presumed by
theological and cosmological iconography and constructed by the most
elementary and intuitive (that is, most amenable to common sens) geom-
etry. For the ego “captivated by the notion of dimensions, that is, by cuts
[i.e. the constitution and localisation of a point by means of intersecting
lines or planes],” the knot is uniquely unsettling:
You will note, for example, that it is very easy to find in [the Borromean
knot] the three planes of reference [i.e. x, y, z] of Cartesian coordinates [see
Fig. 4.10]. And this indeed is what is fallacious about it. Because the
Cartesian coordinates, are all the same something quite different, they are
something which by the very fact that they imply the surface as existent, is
that not so, are at the source of all sorts of fallacious images: the More geo-
metrico which sufficed throughout the centuries to guarantee many things
a supposedly demonstrative character, comes entirely from that.
The fact that the fallacious character of the surface, is that not so, is
demonstrated by the fact that when you try to join it up with this appara-
tus here, you obtain, what constitutes the … siglum of what is involved in
the Borromean knot, namely, the joining at which the three rings are knot-
ted together … And there you are: that is how you must conceive [of how]
the knots are connected up to define this something which is a completely
different definition of the point: namely, the point where the three rings are
wedged together.119
243
Fig. 4.10 Cartesian coordinates and the Borromean knot (See: SXXI, 11/12/73
& 12/2/74)
The boundaries and intersections from which the geometric grid estab-
lishes surfaces and points are paid no heed by the glissement and “wedging”
of the knot. Of course, the projective knot is even less amenable. Because
the rings are not directly linked, the void that subsists where the axis of
the Cartesian coordinates would ordinarily be situated—here, the very
foundation of geometric space has become a topological hole—requires
a third dimension. However, the third dimension, ex-sistence, is not a
matter of volume or depth but of eccentricity—an eccentricity that is
not accounted for by metrics. The size of the rings (which the Cartesian
coordinates would plot) is of no importance; what matters are the non-
Euclidean relationships unique to the Borromean knot. Born of a con-
sistence and a resistance—the resistance of each ring to the others as that
which allows jouissance to be wedged—founded not by the surface but
by the hole and ex-sistence, the knot comprises “the three dimensions
that I define as being the space inhabited by the speaking being.”120 In
a Borromean “geometry of the real” a point is defined not by the junc-
tions of lines or planes but by holes organised by the wedging of three
dit-mensions. Finally, in the Borromean knot of three rings, there are only
four points (JȺ, JΦ, sens and a), as opposed to the virtual infinity of points
opened up by the metrics of indefinite extension and minituarisation
(e.g. 0.4567, 0.45671, etc.). As we shall see, in the four-ringed knot, these
points can have different organisations.
4.5 Deconstruction and the Knot

What is particularly striking about the knot’s mutual interdependence of
mutually exclusive categories is that, despite lacking an ultimate framing
ring or limit (there is no dominant, binding category that envelops the
others [see Fig. 4.11]), it does not spiral off into a post-structuralist ‘bad’
infinity since it can, without its ex-sistence or constitutive emptiness
being compromised, be written or made as a consistent whole that can
be contained on a page or held in one’s hands. If the knot enables Lacan
to once again distinguish psychoanalytic subjectivity from philosophical
ontology (insofar as “my little knot intervenes” in any Aristotelian “chat-
ter” that treats existence as an instantiation of a universal by showing
that “existence is of its nature ex-sistence”121 and thus irreducible to the
symbolic-imaginary constellations into which syllogistic shifts from the
general to the particular attempt to force existence) it also allows him to
settle his accounts with Derrida.
Because it is a “writing [that] supports a real” the knot “changes the
sense of writing”—the writing that “Derrida has insisted on,” namely, the
writing “that results from what one might call the precipitation of the sig-
nifier.”122 Whilst Derrida challenges the apparent solidity of binary oppo-
sitions by reading the inherent and permanent vacillation of différance, he
maintains that access to a third-dimensional hors-texte can only occur in
a delusional, positive sense (immaculate capture of the referent) or nega-
tively, through a deconstructive performance for which the e xtra-discursive
3 3
2 2
1 1
Fig. 4.11 From the armillary sphere to the Borromean knot (See: SXXIII,
pp. 24–25 & 91)
245
target is always “to come.” Regarding this precipitous archi-écriture, Lacan

claims that he preceded Derrida by writing the signifier as “capital S”123
in his re-vamping of the Saussurean sign (by, that is, disjoining signifier
from signified: S/s) in ‘The Instance of the Letter’. By contrast, the nodal
“writing in question comes from somewhere other than the signifier.”124
The knot is somehow firmer than the signifier without fixing a signified or
posing a transcendental master-signifier that would artificially halt the sig-
nifier’s slippage. The knot’s glissement is different to the chain’s metonymic
glissement. The material resistance that each of the knot’s rings offer to
one another, the wedging of an object that the chain’s glissement can only
displace, the fact that the knot’s writing involves not only the hole created
by the signifier but also consistence and ex-sistence—none of these features
or effects of the knot are the result of a philosophical naivety that Derrida
might baulk at. They are instead the result of the knot’s “ternary logic,” its
qualitative “function of the at-least-three.”
For the knot to be written, three holes are required:
( 1) S cuts a hole in R, making it not-all and accessible only in bits.

(2) S is holed: the subject can never satisfactorily say it all (“Urverdrängung:
there is a hole”).125
(3) The foundation of I, the body, is a gut-torus defined by erogenous
orifices.
Remarkably, each hole remains inviolable—S, for example, does not pass
through the hole of R—and yet they each support a linking.
Of course, the claim that the subject’s existence is guarantied by the
hole leaves Lacan open to the charge levelled by Lacoue-Labarthe and
Nancy—that he is importing a negative ontology from philosophical
discourse. Lacan’s rejection of a philosophical discourse has, so the argu-
ment goes, not resulted in a convincing and wholesale break:
Must we understand that the “I think” suffices to insure ex-sistence?

Certainly not, and Descartes stumbles … [F]or something to exist, there
must be a hole. Is not this hole simulated by the “I think,” since Descartes
empties it? … Without these holes, it would not even be thinkable for
something to be knotted …. Existence as such is supported by what, in each
of these terms, RSI, makes a hole.126
This is, in the main, reheated material that would have done little to excite
the intellectual palate of Lacan’s contemporary audience: the alienated
subject is split between thinking and being; there is no suturing instance
of the ‘ergo’ because thought, once it has been emptied of the content
provided by (potentially) deceitful perceptions and intuitions, cannot
guarantee existence. The insubstantial subject produced by Cartesian
doubt is a hole or one empty set. However, with the Borromean knot
(a development exemplified by Lacan’s final sentence), he was finally able
to grant the psychoanalytic subject a little more existential heft without
lapsing into the classical, substantial ontology that his earlier structuralist
endeavours had so stringently circumvented.
Rather than having to choose between the options afforded by a binary
logic—that is, the dichotomy between imaginary consistency and the
symbolic hole, an egoic ontology and a negative ontology—“the function
of the at-least-three” holes is to support an existence that is evenly distrib-
uted across consistency, the hole and ex-sistence. Topologically speaking,
the positivity of the knot materialises in simultaneity with the negativity
of the hole: the knot is tied by means of the hole but the hole is only
constituted when the knot is tied. How could a subject that is something
more than a perpetual, negative fading be presented without reproducing
another variant on the being that the ego believes it constitutes? “How
can a construction be made to ex-sist of which the consistence is indeed
not imaginary? For that, there has to be a hole.”127 We might just as easily
ask how a construction can be made to consist of which the ex-sistence is
not absolutely outside and get the same answer. Nonetheless, this is not a
negative ontology: for there to be a hole, there has to be a consistence and
ex-sistence. In other words, whilst the hole is what enables ex-sistence to
be knotted, it is the ex-sistent presence of the third ring that enables the
hole to insist in its irreducibility.
4.6 Metaphor and the Knot

Let us recall here Badiou’s characterisation of the “late Lacan as someone
who continues to point his finger at an unsayable real” with the hope
that we are now more certain about the basis for, and legitimacy of, such
247
a gesture. If the Borromean knot is a “writing [that] supports a real,”

it does not do so by being the best possible imagistic representation of
the real or by doing away with representation altogether, offering itself
as the noumenal real beyond structure. It instead “supports a real” by
means of a non-metaphorical set of spatio-temporal relations that are
both particular to the knot and are the knot: “the knot alone,” insofar as it
is Borromean, insofar as it is a structure established by the “function of the
at-least-three,” “is the conceivable support of a relationship between any
one thing and any other thing [i.e. the categories R, S and I or the subject
and object a]. Although on the one hand the knot is abstract, it must
none the less be thought and conceived of as something concrete.”128
To borrow a deprecatory term deployed by the new materialists, we might
think of this as a Borromean “correlationism” that operates in concert
with a Borromean materialism. At stake, then, is a logic particular to the
Borromean knot in which relationality and materiality are interdepen-
dent: each mutually guaranties the other.
The rings, in accordance with an inalienable (topo)logic, “butt into”
each other, with each offering the other resistance, in such a fashion that
an irreducible hole is wedged and the relation between subject and object
is established. These two relations “between something and something
else”—that is, the relation between subject and object and the relation
between the categories qua rings that are the subject—are structur-
ally interdependent. It is important to note that the relation between
the categories is a relation between structural qualities or functions
(i.e. ex-sistence, consistence and the hole). Therefore, it is not that the
knot secondarily inscribes connective relations between previously iso-
lated qualities but that the qualities are what allow for relations—rela-
tions that are written the moment the knot is written. It is the Borromean
relationship between RSI that constitutes RSI. For example, without the
hole there would be no means for the knot to consist or for its ‘third’
ring to ex-sist. If the knot did not consist, if its tori became individual
circles, then the holes would not be established as irreducible and, once
again, there would be no means of supporting the real qua ex-sistence.
It is hoped that the reader is convinced that if we are to better appreciate
Lacan’s gift of un bout de réel then it is time to place alongside his more
notorious definitions of the real (as, for example, the impossible or that
which always returns to the same place) the following aphorism: “The
real is characterised by being knotted.”129
For Lacan, the knot was certainly not a metaphor for the real; its topol-
ogy instead challenged the very rules and limits that govern the production
of metaphorical meaning and gave rise to barely legible rhetorical contor-
tions, a Borromean Umschreibung that the reader struggles to navigate:
All that [the Borromean knot] proposes in fact is that the three [categories
qua rings] that are there function as pure consistency. It is only by holding
to each other that they consist—holding to each other really [réellement].
Saying this implies a metaphor. What is the err [erre]—in the sense in
which I understood it last year—of metaphor? Follow me well: if I state—
which can only be done through the symbolic, through speech—that the con-
sistency of these three loops is only supported by the real, it is because I make
use of the distance in sense permitted between RSI as individualising these
loops, specifying them as such. The distance in sense is there supposed
taken at a certain maximum … How would a linguist define the limits of
metaphor, which is to say, of the substitution of one signifier for another?
What is the maximum distance allowed between the two?130
What is the error of metaphor? The knot dynamically stages the meta-
phorical substitution of imaginary consistence for real ex-sistence and vice
versa (consisting by means of an ex-sistent ring), but, in doing so, meta-
phor’s binary logic is torn apart at the seams as it stretches to cover the
“distance in sense” between R and I and accomplish the same feat as the
knot. The metaphor could not hold together. The substitutive action that
would see R and I placed under the aegis of a metalinguistic S fails; there
is no credible link that can be established between R and I; they remain,
according to a binary logic, axiomatically incompatible or at a “maxi-
mum” distance from one another. And yet, whilst the linguistic chain
comes apart, the knot resists: its rings do not directly link but instead
“consist [by] holding to each other really [réellement].” In other words,
the knot holds by virtue of the very same contradiction that disarticulates
the chain. However, we cannot remain at the level of absolute heteroge-
neity because their presentation in the knot homogenises the categories
(insofar as they are three topologically indistinguishable rings fulfilling an
equivalent relational function). It is this homogeneirty that puts in place
249
the heterogeneity of R and I in a knot that consists réellement. Therefore,

were this knot to become a linguistic object, the linguist would be forced
to define not only the maximum distance of metaphor but also its mini-
mum. The gap between R and I that S would suture is, in simultaneity,
absolutely maximal and minimal: the binary logic of sameness and differ-
ence no longer makes any sense. The binary logic of the linguistic “system
of oppositions,” which relies upon there being a quantifiable “distance”
between terms in order for it to make sense, cannot account for the knot’s
qualitative “ternary logic” that, of course, is itself the result of a failed met-
aphor—the failure, that is, of the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-
Father, to effect an imaginary closure of S and a definitive exclusion of
R. It is from this defect that the Borromean knot derives its structure—a
structure in which RSI are entangled without a hierarchical order.
4.7 From “Thinking-the-Borromean-Knot”

to “Monstrating the Cord”: Writing
the Lacanian (Dis)solution
In the second session of Seminar XXII Lacan used the Borromean knot to
position three affective experiences: anxiety, inhibition and the symptom
(see Fig. 4.2). Each affect is written as the effect of a non-relationship
between one ring and another ring. For example, anxiety is produced
at the edge of R and in the hole of I—that is, at the point at which I is
incomplete and maladroitly bound to R. Following the trajectory of this
affect we can see that whilst anxiety initially passes through S, it eventu-
ally comes to ex-sist to S—the ring that establishes a Borromean relation-
ship between terms (i.e. I and R) that, without it, would have absolutely
no relationship. From this topology of anxiety we can infer that anxiety
would have no place if S were not there to knot R to I (because anxiety
results from the conjunction of these two registers) but also that S is not
always capable of preventing anxiety (qua invasion of I by R). Therefore,
whilst anxiety is not caused by S—indeed, S interposes distance between
the subject and das Ding—this category is still its condition of possibility
because anxiety is the result of the incapacity of S.
In the final session of Seminar XXII Lacan argued that anxiety, inhibi-
tion and the symptom each assume the Name-of-the-Father’s function by
tying the knot through the nomination of R, I and S respectively.
This process of nomination has its own Borromean numeration
whereby rings 1 and 2 (i.e. the two rings supported by a Borromean
non-relationship) are knotted by what Lacan calls the “buckle.”131 In
“the chain 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 … the 1 … [is] knotted to the 2 through the 3
and through the 4.”132 The non-relationship between 1 and 2—numbers
that call to mind ontological unity (1) and the sexual relationship (2 as
1)—is even more decisively monstrated by the four-ringed knot. As ever,
the linear addition of successive components is not in operation here:
consistency, ex-sistence and the hole are supported by nomination. In
contradistinction to Derrida’s account, writing, as the inscription of the
subject’s nom propre (a topic first broached in Seminar IX), is not a mat-
ter of the “precipitation of the signifier” but of forging and particularis-
ing a “linknot” between categories. Freudian concepts, first outlined in
the 1925 paper Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, are not re-found by
Lacan in countless case studies or re-iterated by clever definitions and lazy
acceptations but are instead placed by a nodal writing.
There are many different ways to write the knot of four rings and Fig.
4.12 provides three examples. In the knot of Ns, the non-relationship
between the two extreme rings of I (the body) and R (the non-existence
of the sexual relationship) are supported by two middling rings that
redouble each other, thereby figuring “the duplicity of the symbol and the
symptom”133 or the comingling of the signifier and the jouissance in Ns.
The four-ringed knot permits Lacan to discuss the relation between his
categories with much greater detail and specificity. Here, R (ring 1) “takes
up [the symbol and the symptom] in their entirety”134 because they both
pass under and over R, while I does not because they only pass under or
over. The result is an asymmetrical knot in which R is more comprehen-
sively implicated than I.
Ni should, Lacan suggests, be written as an infinite straight line
because such a topology “inhibits the management of anything demon-
strative. It is a bar, at the level itself of the imagination, to all that is
articulated as symbolic.”135 Imaginary nomination, as the effect of I on
S (see Fig. 4.2), inhibits the movement of signifiers necessary for the
251
demonstration of both the subject and the Other’s desire/lack. The notion
of an actual “point at infinity” and the equivalence between a circle and
an infinite straight line required by the projective knot are foreclosed by
the Euclidean imagination that inhibits a symbolic demonstration of ex-
sistence. Recall here Lacan’s contention that modern science and psycho-
analysis, sharing the laevogyratory configuration of IRS, “imagine that
there might be a real of the symbolic.”
The reader will notice that the knot depicted in Fig. 4.12 has a differ-
ent appearance to what we have presented thus far. Lacan flagged up this
difference in Seminar XX when he referred to both “simple rings” and
components that are “ear-shaped.”136 In presenting the knot of hooked
ears, he never inscribed the three modes of jouissance or the object a and
instead preserved the inscription of such mathemes for the most mini-
mal and pure form of the knot—the knot composed of “simple rings”
(see Fig. 4.2). This was perhaps because in the former presentation the
1 4
2
3 Ni Nr Ns
1 2 R S I S I
4 I R S
Fig. 4.12 Nomination and the knot (Lacan first approaches this structure in
SXXII, 13/5/75. He provides two different figurations—a symmetrical and an
asymmetrical knot—in SXXIII, p. 13. See also: ‘Lecture on the Body’, pp. 6–7)
holes lose something of their certainty—their wedging—and begin to

bleed into each other through the holes of the ears. For example, in a
particular transition from a knot written with oreilles to a knot composed
purely of ronds Lacan states “let’s come back to the diagram … in which
there are three fields.”137 Nevertheless, the very fact that the two “simple
rings” on the ends of each knot in Fig. 4.12 are not in contact with one
another tells us something about the jouissance of each configuration—
namely, that in each knot (Ni, Nr or Ns) there is a mode of jouissance that
cannot be wedged; namely, the jouissance that in the three-ringed knot
occupies the hole created by whichever categories are 1 and 2 in the four-
ringed knot. For example, in Nr (anxiety) there can be no linking of S
and I and no sens. Here, only the jouissance of a misfiring phallic significa-
tion (JΦ) and a traumatic encounter with the Other’s lack (JȺ) are pres-
ent. The neurotic Ns excludes JȺ and wedges only JΦ and sens. Inhibition
is characterised by the embrace of sens, a fear of the ever-present threat of
Ⱥ and, consequently, a denial of desire (JΦ). We can reach a compromise
between the two different presentations of the knot and see how a mode
of jouissance ex-sists to the ring that is redoubled by nomination:
***
Efforts to identify in the twenty-third seminar a conceptual break and
definitively separate the symptom as a normal (which is to say, neurotic)
père-version (Ns) from the sinthome as a singular suppletion of a knot that
would otherwise structure psychosis are rather undermined by Lacan’s
own vacillations: “the father is a symptom, or a sinthome, as you wish”138
or: “Analysis does not consist in being freed from one’s sinthomes, since
that is how I write symptom.”139 In the opening session of Seminar XXIII
Lacan announced that he would be taking inspiration from Joyce’s wish,
expressed in Ulysses, to “Hellenize” his own lalangue and begin writing
the sinthome with the Greek sigma (Σ).140 He then provided the very
same diamond configuration presented in Fig. 4.12 and simply replaced
Ns with Σ: “the link of 1 onto 2, indeed of 2 onto 1, has in the midst
of it, as it were, the 3 and the 4, that is, the Σ and the S.”141 There is no
strict terminological distinction between the sinthome and the symptom
in Lacan’s teaching; there are only varieties of sinthomes (or symptoms, as
you wish…) and all are responses to a generalised foreclosure, a general
253
failure of the Name-of-the-Father to make a non-barred Other consist.

The Oedipus complex—the reference to prohibition as a defence against
a recognition that the sexual relationship does not exist and that the
Other is barred—is just as much a sinthome as Joyce’s art. It is merely
the case that the former is the sinthome of the neurotic and the latter is
the sinthome of the non-triggered psychotic. In what follows, the terms
symptom and sinthome will be treated as interchangeable.
***
In an opaque passage in Seminar XXII, Lacan provides the fundamen-
tals of a practice that would not be the imagining of the “surface-fiction”
of an embroidered fabric:
The question evoked at this time of my statement is the following, which

responds to the notion of consistency inasmuch as this supposes the notion
of a demonstration: what can be supposed a demonstration in the real?
Nothing supposes it other than the consistency of which the cord is here
the support. The cord is the foundation of accord … [and] thus becomes
the symptom of that by which the symbolic consists.
A formula that does not go badly with what language testifies to—to
wear down to the thread [montrer la corde], by which the wearing of the
weave is designated. When the cord is monstrated [montrer], it is because
the weave is no longer camouflaged in what one calls the fabric [l’étoffe].
Fabric is of a permanent metaphoric usage—it is what … would give the
image of a substance. The formula ‘to monstrate [montrer] the cord’ tells us
that there is no fabric that is not a weave.142
Whereas a completed fabric obscures the hole, the act of weaving makes
evident that it can only be written and re-written on the basis of holes.
There is a difference between imagining a substance or surface and mon-
strating the cord: much of Lacan’s work on the knot is concerned with
elucidating this difference. In a “geometry of weaving,” positive substance
(the consistence by which the knot holds firm) and the hole are struc-
turally interdependent. The materiality of the rings is dependent upon
the irreducibility of the hole and vice versa. Returning to the act of the
potter, as one who creates a hole in simultaneity with a rim, if “a circle
… is only the consequence of the hole,”143 we must still ask “what is a
hole if nothing surrounds it?”144 Lacan’s “demonstration in the real,” his

psychoanalytic practice, will not amount to the articulation of a wisdom
or “knowledge in the real” but will instead involve a “monstration” of the
analysand’s response to what does not work in the real. This response is
“the symptom … by which the symbolic consists”; it is what assumes the
structural function of the Name-of-the-Father. Importantly, this particu-
lar mode of jouissance, this artificial suppletion of the barred Other, is
revealed in practice to be the edge or a hole rather than the hole’s suture
(“the weave is no longer camouflaged in what one calls the fabric”). What
is at stake is the consistency of a hole, not the consistency of a surface.
Whilst Lacan maintained that the determining quality of S was the
hole of Urverdrängung (the impossibility of saying it all), he also argued
that the subject derives jouissance from this hole—be it either jouis-sens
(enjoying a fallacious and synthetic totalisation [S+I]) or phallic jouis-
sance (enjoying the interminable metonymy of desire [S+R]). Reflecting
this intertwining of signifier and jouissance, Lacan noted that a fourth
ring, the symptom (Σ), and the unconscious (S) “make a circle: Σ+S,
this makes a new sort of S. The symptom is just as much a part of the
unconscious … In interpreting, we make with the Σ a circularity, we give
full exercise to what can be supported of lalangue.”145 In other words,
the symptom is the particular way in which the subject repeatedly cir-
cumscribes the hole of primordial repression (Urverdrängung) introduced
by the symbolic (the circle of Σ+S (qua Ns+S) is depicted in Fig. 4.13).
The symptomatic cord is the subject’s non-egoic “foundation of accord”
I R S
Nr Ns Ni
sens JΦ sens
JA JA JΦ
a a a
sens JA
JΦ
S R I S R I
Fig. 4.13 Nr, Ns and Ni

255
because it links the hole of S to the consistence of I and the ex-sistence

of R. Therefore, the symptom involves all three dit-mensions but is not
reducible to any of them.
At Caracas, Lacan commented that “I think I situate myself better than
Freud did in the real at stake where the unconscious [S] is concerned.
Because the jouissance of the body [I] forms a point [Σ] where it con-
fronts the unconscious [S].”146 Again, Lacan’s quarrel with Freud does
not concern conceptual knowledge as such; rather, it is a matter of place.
In Freud’s topography the body had enveloped the drives and the uncon-
scious. Contrary to this good form, in Lacan’s knot the unconscious (S)
is not linked to I; rather, it “ex-sists in dis-corps,” making no “accord with
the body” because “[t]he unconscious is what, by speaking, determines
the subject as … a being … struck through with this metonymy with
which I support desire as for all impossible ever to say as such.”147 The
“foundation of accord” lays not in the rediscovery of biological instinct
through the jettisoning of S or the unification of S and I (the immaculate
articulation of desire) but in Σ. In such a knot
it is a matter of a representation of the real insofar as it is here that we have

the apprehension of the imaginary, of the symptom and of the symbolic,
the symbolic on this particular occasion being very precisely what we must
think about as being the signifier. What does that mean? The fact is that the
signifier on this particular occasion is a symptom, a body, namely, the imagi-
nary being distinct from the signified. This way of making the chain ques-
tions us about the following: the fact is that the real … would be very
specially suspended [suspendu] on the body.148
In French, suspendre has the same double meaning as suspension in

English: R, as the impossibility of the sexual relationship, ex-sists as that
which both hangs onto the body (that is knotted to S) and is excluded by
it. This suspension is special because it is guarantied not by S and I but
by S, I and Σ. In their suspension of R, this latter trio composes “a new
imaginary” distinct from any effet de signifié, a body of the “gut-torus”
affected by the materiality of a signifier that, because it is detached from
signification, resonates and “leaves traces which are nothing other than
the symptom.”149
The analyst is able to zero in on the hole firmed up by Σ and the

master-signifiers closest to it by reading the analysand’s symptomatic rep-
etitions—those slips and blunders (lalangue) heavy with jouissance: “The
important thing here is the reference to writing to situate the repetition
of the symptom, as it presents itself in my practice.”150 “I follow the trail
of the hole, and I encounter the Borromean knot”151 as the insoluble
structure (i.e. the knotting of RSI by Σ) written in accordance with an
original sin—the first syllable of sinthome—and in the absence of the
sexual relationship.
Lacan gives the “unary trait”—the non-signifying mark that in the
accession to subjectivity begins the differential count—a topological
“support … written [as] DI. These are the initials of droite infinie, the
straight line stretching to infinity … [I]t’s the best illustration of the hole
there is, better than the circle … The infinite straight line possesses the
virtue of having the hole all around it. It’s the simplest support for the
hole.”152 The enigma of this hole is not that of a veiled meaning; rather,
the enigma is derived from its topology, its place as a hole that is every-
where and not the centre of a structuralist cosmology (De revolutionibus
orbium litteralium). Psychoanalytic interpretation must “make a circle”
of the hole originally written by the DI—the hole of Urverdrängung that
finds its irreducibility at the “point at infinity,” the ex-sistent point that
guaranties the knot’s consistence—by reading the presence of Σ in S. The
transition from DI to Σ+S certainly does not involve imposing a finite
limit on the subject’s speech but instead concerns a reading of this speech
to the letter that detects the subject’s jouissant organisation of the hole.
Σ+S does not transform S into a closed set: “when the other end of
the cord is knotted”—when, that is, the cord’s consistence is shown to
be dependent upon an unspeakable ex-sistence—“one can hold onto it.
This has to do with the real.”153 There is something that resists and wedges.
The cord of the symptom provides the analyst with a support because it
is knotted to the real which, we recall, is what you encounter precisely by
not being able, in psychoanalysis, to say just anything whatsoever. This
is not the barred subject of repetition automatism: when the subject of
Σ+S—this “new sort of S” that is also the foundation of the “new imagi-
nary,” the “circle” that binds consistence and ex-sistence—speaks, he
enjoys. Lacan “define[s] the symptom by the fashion in which each jouit
257
from the unconscious insofar as the unconscious determines him.”154

Σ+S denotes the combination of an opaque jouissance and the signify-
ing chains of unconscious savoir. Rather than searching for meaning, the
analyst must hold onto the cord of the symptom that, in the absence of
meaning, provides interpretation with a rigour and purpose (which is to
say that the non-sens is not a randomised play of the signifier): “analysis is
… the response to a riddle. Moreover, it’s a response … that is quite espe-
cially daft. This is precisely why one must keep a firm hold on the rope
[corde]. I mean that, if one has no idea where the rope ends, namely, in
the knot of the sexual non-relation, one runs the risk of floundering.”155
How might the analyst flounder? Breezily remarking in Seminar XXIV
that psychoanalysis is “attached” to the idea of “putting outside what
is inside, namely, the unconscious”—we should of course be wary here
because much of Lacan’s interest in topology derived from its effective
destabilisation of this binary—he proceeds to write the topology (qua
structural effect of practice) that would result from this imprudent attach-
ment.156 Lacan’s knots are composed of three tori. If a cut is applied to
the surface of a torus, one can turn it inside-out. What also occurs when
the internal surface becomes the external surface is that the two holes of
the torus (the tubular emptiness circled by demand and the ‘extimate’
void circled by desire in Fig. 2.4) swap with one another. Now, if in
approaching the knot of RSI we were to apply a cut to S in an effort to
drag the unconscious outside, engaging in a search for the hidden truth
or buried meaning, what happens is that the ring of S effectively envelops
the rings of R and I. Having previously been ex-sistently knotted to S, the
other rings would be now knotted inside S because this latter ring’s holes
have been swapped around. This is the outcome of “risk[ing]” a “prefer-
ence given above all to the unconscious,”157 which is to say that inter-
pretation has proceeded in thrall to the pleasure principle. Rather than
judiciously intervening by reading the letters of his analysand’s speech as
symptomatic of a non-relationship between RSI (reading S as Σ+S), the
analyst has encouraged his analysand to ramble on (in the hope that he
might say that or say it all), with the result being an excess of significa-
tion that obscures what is actually at stake. If left at this point, this will
be an interpretation carried out by someone who not only “has no idea
where the rope ends” but also has not held onto the rope in the first place,
favouring sens over the jouissant non-sens of Σ+S. In such a case, a second
cut and reversal will be required to restore the suspension of ex-sistence
(as opposed to its containment).
Of course, it is perfectly possible that the analysand’s knot has not
been tied by Ni, Nr or Ns and is instead structured slightly differently. In
the writing of Joyce’s knot there had been a fault, an inversion of one of
the crossings shared by S and R.158 As a result, the unconscious and R did
not ex-sist to one another and were instead directly linked. A further con-
sequence of this lapsus calami was that I, the source of “corps-sistance,” was
no longer attached to the knot. The failure of the phallic signifier to strike
R into ex-sistence and the subsequent loss of imaginary consistency are
the fundamental relationships that structure psychosis. By intervening at
the precise point that a fault has occurred, “the sinthome is what enables
the Borromean link to be mended.”159 This was engineered outside the
clinic by the writer himself: in his sinthome—which Lacan referred to as
Joyce’s Ego; the name that Joyce made for himself through his art—Joyce
found a way not of correcting the link between R and S but of exploit-
ing and enjoying it, thereby reintegrating consistency. The epiphanies, the
singular lalangue, the comedic disregard for proper names and paternal
or imperial authority all became the manipulated material of “an Ego of
enigmatic functions, of reparatory functions.”160
The analyst’s task is to ascertain the minimal structure of the analsy-
and’s knot. What is holding the knot together? Is it Ns, Nr or Ni? Does
it have an asymmetric combination of above-beneath crossings? Are two
or more of the rings directly chained together? If one “holds onto” the
cord and tugs it, what comes loose and what gets wedged? The knot
may present itself with numerous crossing points (i.e. points at which
I, S, R and Σ overlap and produce holes in which a particular mode of
jouissance lurks) that are not integral to its consistence and ex-sistence.
In what mathematicians refer to as Reidemeister moves, crossings can be
can be added, moved or removed (providing that none of these actions
require a cut or splice) until the minimal structure of the knot has been
established.161 Of course, there is no telling how many such moves will be
required before the knot is constructed and read in practice. This is not a
point that Lacan addressed at any great length, although his references to
the “generalised Borromean” in Seminar XXVI: Topology and Time suggest
that he was moving in this direction before he died.162
259
4.8 Notes
1. SXX, p. 133.
2. SXXII, 8/4/75.
3. Ibid., 18/3/75.
4. Ibid.
5. SXXIII, p. 123.
6. Ibid., p. 125.
9. Jacques Lacan, ‘Interview with Pierre Daix of 26 November, 1966’, http://
aejcpp.free.fr/lacan/1966-11-26.htm Unpaginated.
10. SVII, p. 137.
12. SXXII, 10/12/74.
14. Ibid., p. 19.
15. SXXIII, p. 9.
16. SXIII, 1/6/66.
17. SX, p. 249.
18. Ibid.
19. SXI, p. 104.
22. SXX, p. 117.
23. SXXIII, p. 58.
24. SX, p. 277.
25. SXX, p. 129.
26. Colin C. Adams, The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the
Mathematical Theory of Knots (Providence, RI: AMS, 2004), p. 4.
27. Adrian Price, ‘In the Nebohood of Joyce and Lacan’, LC Express, 2, issue
14 (2014), p. 7. Italics original.
28. SXXIII, p. 30.
30. SXXIV, 16/11/76.
31. SXXII, 17/12/74.
32. SXXI, 11/12/73.
33. SXXII, 17/12/74.
34. Ibid., 18/3/75.

35. SXXIII, p. 116.
36. SXXII, 18/3/75.
37. Ibid., 21/1/75.
38. Lorenzo Chiesa, Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of
Lacan (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), p. 188.
39. SXXIV, 16/11/76.
40. SXXII, 14/1/75.
41. Ibid., 18/2/75.
42. SXXIII, p. 26.
43. SXXIII, pp. 108–109.
44. Joyce, Finnegans Wake, pp. 114, 20.
45. SXXII, 14/1/75.
46. SXXIII, p. 118.
47. SXXII, 14/1/75.
48. Ibid., 10/12/74.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 18/3/75.
51. SXXIII, p. 104.
52. SXXIV, 15/2/77.
53. SXXII, 18/3/75.
54. SXXIV, 16/11/76.
55. SXXIII, p. 104.
56. Ibid., p. 26.
57. SXXII, 15/4/75.
58. SXI, p. 26.
59. Beckett, Trilogy, p. 400.
60. Jacques Lacan ‘Spring Awakening’, trans. Silvia Rodriguez, Analysis, no. 6
(Melbourne: Centre for Psychoanalytic Research, 1995), p. 33.
61. SXXIII, p. 104.
62. Ibid., p. 132.
63. Ibid., p. 50.
64. Fredric Jameson, ‘Lacan and the Dialectic: A Fragment’, in Lacan: The
Silent Partners, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2006), pp. 391–392.
65. SXXIII, p. 102.
66. Ibid., p. 89.
67. SXXII, 13/5/75.
68. SXXIV, 11/1/77.
261
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 15/2/77.
71. SXXIII, p. 104. I have altered the translation of broderie, substituting
embellishment for embroidery—a move I believe is justified by Lacan’s
preoccupation with threading, weaving, etc.
72. SXXIII, p. 105. Translation altered.
73. SXXIV, 15/2/77.
74. SXXII, 15/4/75.
75. For a more detailed discussion of the sexual relationship and the
Borromean knot, see: Guy Le Gaufey, ‘The Scholion: A Misuse of
Metaphor’, trans. Cormac Gallagher, in The Letter 47 (Dublin, 2011),
pp. 67–83.
76. SXXII, 15/4/75.
77. Le Gaufey, ‘Scholion’, p. 74.
78. SXXII, 18/3/75.
79. SXXI, 13/11/73.
80. Ibid.
81. This demonstration takes place in SXXIII, pp. 92–97. Lacan’s first apper-
ception of this fact of structure can be found in SXXII, 8/4/75.
82. SXXVI, 9/1/79.
83. SXXI, 18/12/73.
84. See: SVII, pp. 139–154.
85. SXXI, 18/12/73.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. For a more detailed account of the relationship between Lacan’s knots and
braids see: Jean Brini, ‘De l’impossible correspondance entre noeuds et
tresses’, topologie.2013.monsite-orange.fr/etudesborromeennes/index.
html (2014) (accessed 9 June 2016). Brini’s website contains many rigor-
ous and illuminating essays on psychoanalysis, logic and topology.
90. Jacques Lacan, ‘Remarks on Hysteria’, p. 1. ‘Propos sur l’hysterie’, p. 5.
91. SXXIV, 11/1/77.
93. SXX, pp. 111–112.
94. Ibid., pp. 131–132.
96. SXXIII, p. 70.
97. Adams, The Knot Book, p. 22.

98. SXXII, 10/12/74. Translation altered.
99. SXXIII, p. 5.
100. SXXII, 10/12/74.
101. SXXIII, p. 88.
103. SXXIII, p. 38.
104. Lacan, ‘Lecture on the Body’, p. 6.
105. SXXII, 18/3/75.
106. Ibid., 13/5/75.
107. Ibid., 18/3/75.
108. Ibid.
109. SXXIV, 18/1/77.
110. SXXII, 18/3/75.
111. Lacan, ‘Lecture on the Body’, p. 7.
112. SXXIII, p. 43.
113. SXXII, 8/4/75.
115. Ibid., p. 95.
116. Ibid., p. 102.
118. SXXI, 14/5/74.
119. Ibid., 12/2/74. Translation altered.
120. Ibid., 13/11/73.
121. SXXII, 14/1/75.
122. SXXIII, p. 124.
123. Ibid.
124. Ibid., p. 125.
126. SXXII, 17/12/74.
127. Ibid., 11/2/75.
128. SXXIII, p. 26.
129. SXXII, 15/4/75.
130. Ibid., 17/12/74.
131. SXXII, 13/5/75.
132. Ibid.
133. SXXIII, p. 14.
134. Ibid., p. 13.
263
135. SXXII, 13/5/75.

136. SXX, p. 125. In Seminar XXI Lacan referred to these rings as the “folded
buckle” and would later use them to depict nomination (see Figs. 4.12
and 4.13). SXXI, 12/3/74.
137. SXXIII, p. 43.
138. Ibid., p. 11.
139. SXXV, 10/1/78.
140. SXXIII, p. 3.
141. SXXIII, p. 12.
142. Ibid., 21/1/75. Translation altered.
143. Ibid., 13/5/75.
144. Ibid., 18/2/75.
147. SXXII, 21/1/75.
148. SXXIV, 18/1/77. Lacan is referring to a particular configuration which
reads from left to right: R – I – Σ – S.
149. SXXV, 10/1/78.
150. Ibid., 21/1/75.
151. Ibid., 8/4/75.
152. SXXIII, pp. 125–126.
153. SXXII, 14/1/75.
154. Ibid., 18/2/75.
155. SXXIII, p. 57.
156. SXXIV, 14/12/76.
157. Ibid.
158. Since a number of illuminating and authoritative studies of Lacan’s read-
ing of Joyce have been published in recent years, our remarks on this topic
have been kept relatively brief. For an essay-length account see: Price, ‘In
the Nebohood of Joyce and Lacan’. For a book-length study see: Roberto
Harari, How James Joyce made his Name, trans. Luke Thurston (New York:
Other Press, 2002).
159. SXXIII, p. 76.
160. Ibid., p. 133.
161. See: Adams, The Knot Book, pp. 12–16.
162. See: SXXVI, 12/12/78 & 20/3/79.
5
Conclusion: A New Imaginary
You will tell me that I run on, and even to the point of tiring you. It’s just that
I make an effort to disentangle myself from what is fundamental to thought …
the typical imbecility … of the human humour in regard to the real, which,
however, it has to deal with.
Lacan.1
In January 1969 Serge Leclaire and various other Lacanians established

the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Vincennes. This
experimental institution struggled to emerge from the strangulated ado-
lescence of student unrest and, following the resignation of Leclaire in
1970, descended into such a state of unworkable and, worse, unimagi-
native anarchy that by 1974 Lacan felt compelled to intervene. Having
made several alterations to the organisation and personnel of the depart-
ment (which we will not discuss here), Lacan, in a 1975 écrit titled ‘Peut-
être à Vincennes…’, provided a rudimentary syllabus consisting of four
topics—linguistics, logic, anti-philosophy and topology—with the con-
dition that these “sciences” would not be “taught in the university mode,”
instead finding in the psychoanalytic “experience” the occasion of their

266 W. Greenshields
“renewal.”2 A perfectly credible case can be made in favour of the conten-

tion that linguistics, logic and philosophy—we are assuming here that
anti-philosophy represented a renewal of philosophy rather than being a
field that itself required renewal—have been taken in novel and produc-
tive directions (e.g. the development of linguisterie, the formalisation of
the pas-tout, the theorisation of the irresolvable split between the “being
of knowledge” and the “being of truth” or the elaboration of a nodal
onto-graphy founded on consistence, ex-sistence, the hole and the symp-
tom) that are of interest not just to analysts but also to linguists, logicians
and philosophers. We would, however, be on shakier ground in suggest-
ing that the same is true of Lacan’s topologerie. He admits as much in
the short passage in ‘Peut-être à Vincennes…’ that he dedicates to topol-
ogy, stating that this science has yet to be influenced by psychoanalysis.
Although in 1975 he did perhaps still retain this ambition, which was
more plausible given that he had, by this point, turned his attention to
the relatively young field of knot theory and surrounded himself with
accomplished mathematicians, he restricts himself to stating that, thus
far, the gain has been the analyst’s.
In this respect, topology enjoys a certain privilege over the other three
topics: it has not needed to be integrally altered for it to be of use to
the analyst; as we saw in Chap. 2, its status is that of the fundamental
relationships of the psychoanalytic field; the space and time of the psy-
choanalytic subject. Granted, Lacan’s handling of topology is, at times,
idiosyncratic, and we might think here of the use he makes of aspects
of both the visible cross-cap and what we might call the mathemati-
cian’s (or theoretical) cross-cap, but this handling never amounted to a
radical renewal or reorientation of topology precisely because none was
needed. Further evidence of topology’s pre-eminence can be found in the
fact that Lacan topologised each of the three other topics: presenting lin-
guisterie with the Möbius strip, the anti-philosophical split with the cross-
cap and the “place” of Φx with the Klein bottle. Topology was not simply
one resource among others in the psychoanalytic field’s extension, one
object in the class of objects denoted by the term ‘Lacanian psychoanal-
ysis’; indeed, the very structure of psychoanalytic field—the “collusion
in heterotopy” of intensional and extensional psychoanalysis—was itself
topological. Far from being merely another shiny bauble collected by an
intellectual magpie during the course of his return to Freud, topology
5 Conclusion: A New Imaginary
267
was, as we saw in Chap. 3, the very structure of the re-turn. If Lacan’s

“symptomatic response” to the Freudian legacy was to “invent” the real
and gift a topological writing that supports it to his readers, it was in
order to renew psychoanalysis in the face of the ego psychologist’s coher-
ence without rigour and formalise the basis upon which psychoanalytic
effectiveness could be judged (as topological cuts and re-writing), thereby
rebutting the assertion that psychoanalysis’s rejection of the empirical
coherence promised by dosage data makes it an entirely unrigorous prac-
tice. We have concluded with a reconstruction of the absent crux of the
case presentation witnessed by Hogan—“Lacan’s analysis of knots”—in
an effort to monstrate the final result of Lacan’s déblayage, his ‘solution’
to the great casse-tête.
Throughout the 1970s, topology was not just the hypokeimenon of
Lacan’s teaching and practice—the fundamental spatio-temporal relations
between his mathemes and the very “stuff into which [the psychoanalyst]
cuts.”3 As his seminars began to more closely resemble a peculiarly pri-
vate form of public research than they did a teaching, topology became
the source and support of his thought, the enigmatically woven field in
which new ideas thrived or died. This writing became the thing itself. Le
Gaufey’s observation that “Lacan deliberately [made] himself a dupe of
writing”4 is well-put. To deliberately make oneself a dupe is to consciously
accede control over the elaboration of conceptual knowledge and place
it in the lap (or lapsus) not of the gods but of an incompletely mathema-
tised écrits inspirés. Theory was to be developed in practice.
For many years, Lacan had made himself the dupe of Freud’s writ-
ing—reading Freud to the letter, refusing to be directed by the common
sens of the neo-Freudian consensus and instead allowing his own course
to be decided by Freud’s repetitions, hesitations and uncertainties while
also criticising those instances (such as the Dora case study) where Freud
had failed to made himself the dupe of the literality of his analysand’s
desire—before making himself the dupe of a nodal writing—a writing
that was itself fraught with blunders and uncertainty. It is worth reciting
Lacan’s entreaty: “To operate with this knot in a suitable fashion, you
must use it stupidly. Be dupes. Do not enter this subject in obsessional
doubt.” If psychoanalysis is to survive the twenty-first century—a century
in which the battle lines are being drawn with a heretofore unseen stark-
ness between non-dupes and martyrs, between the inflexible atheism of a
268 W. Greenshields
reductive biologisation or pharmaceuticalisation of mental health and the

spiritual security of caliphates and healing crystals—it will be because it
supports, by means of a rigour without egoic coherence, a practice of reading
that is neither that of the obsessional doubter nor the disciple, but that
of the “good dupe.”
In making ourselves the dupes of Lacan’s writing, we are forced to
take seriously contentions and questions that seem at odds with what we
might think we know about the unconscious structured like a language:
How are we to know whether the unconscious is real or imaginary? That is

the question. It partakes of an equivocation between the two.
This is what we are now committed to, thanks to Freud, and in the guise
of the sinthome. I mean that henceforth we are dealing with the sinthome in
the sexual relation.5
Certainly, because it participates in the equivocal division between two

signifiers (S1 and S2), the unconscious is aligned with S, but, because it
is involved in an equivocal circularity between two (Σ+S) that allows the
subject to jouir the non-existence of the relationship between two sexes,
it also structurally “partakes of an equivocation” between R and I (see
Fig. 4.12), thereby allowing R to “be very specially suspended on the
body.” Contra the standard periodisation of Lacan’s thought—according
to which he turned his attention to the real having previously concen-
trated on the imaginary and the symbolic—this Borromean formulation
makes it clear that R is only put in place by Σ+S (which “makes a new
sort of S”) and “a new imaginary,” a nodal consistency that is written in
simultaneity with the suspension of ex-sistence. Lacan was at pains to
stress that “the imaginary, is a dit-mansion … just as important as the oth-
ers.”6 As he had noted in Seminar VII, architecture is organised around
an emptiness7 and this mansion of the dit is no different. However, while
this emptiness can be disavowed (with a specious ergo that rescues the
Cartesian being), sublimated or made the basis of a negative ontology, for
the psychoanalyst it is to be made the support of a knotting.
As we have had cause to note previously, Lacan, in the process of estab-
lishing “a new imaginary”—or, more precisely, a new school—remarked
in 1980 that R features in the knot not just as a ‘third’ ex-sistent ring or
the impossibility of there being a knot of one or two rings but also as the
269
infinite straight line that effectively secures the knot’s consistence at an ex-
sistent “point at infinity.” According to Lacan, this “infinite straight line …
is quite precisely the inhibition that thought has in respect to the knot”8—
that is, “the thought that makes a circle.”9 Insofar as it consists réellement
through a strangely rigorous equivocation—that is, the buckling of Σ+S that
“partakes of an equivocation between” between R and I—surpassing both
the closed finitude of metaphor’s illusory binding of sens and the ‘bad’ infin-
ity of metonymy’s deferral of sens, “the much-vaunted Borromean knot that
I’ve been relying on,” as an example of “our new mos geometricus,” “rests
entirely on the equivalence between a circle and a straight line stretching to
infinity.”10 This equivalence (or equivocation) is written by the knot.
In attempting to answer the simple question, “why topology?”, we can
conclude by suggesting that, for Lacan, this “writing is a fashioning that
gives support to pondering [pensée]”11—a pondering that does not make a
circle, a pondering that is not supported by a reducible abstraction inca-
pable of organising a hole and does not mistake the elliptical re-turn for
good form or presuppose an uncomplicated delineation of Innenwelt and
Umwelt. While inhibition is topologically figured as the extension of I in
the hole of S (see Fig. 4.2) or a mode of linking that keeps S and R apart
(see Fig. 4.12), psychoanalytic thought, as an imagining of the R of S,
requires a certain orientation (IRS). And how might one ponder the R of
S without morosely expelling it? For that, Lacan decides, one requires a
topology (along with linguistics, logic and anti-philosophy…).
It is surely no coincidence that it was in front of an American audience
that Lacan argued that “[k]nots are the thing against which the mind most
rebels … I consider breaking oneself in to the practice of knots as breaking
inhibition … [T]he imaginary would be formed by mental inhibition.”12
Was it not a “mental inhibition,” a deficient “human humour in regard to
the real,” that greeted psychoanalysis in America? And has not the Anglo-
American reception of Lacan’s topological turn been characterised by a
certain inhibition, an unwillingness to move beyond the non-dupe’s var-
ied expressions of incredulity, complacent dismissal and even diagnosis13
and make oneself the dupe of a writing that does not immediately reveal
its sense? In addition to presenting structural paradoxes that are only
misrepresented by Euclidean geometry or Freudian topography and serv-
ing as the support for the development of psychoanalytic thought, a third
role for topology in Lacan’s work is intriguingly suggested here. No mere
270 W. Greenshields
heuristic device, “the practice of knots”—it is tempting to take this as

a synonym for psychoanalysis itself—has an effect on the subject who
must make himself the dupe of a writing against which the mind—that
is, the conscious mentation that recognises only the Euclidean space of
the ego and requires a pre-existing theory prior to practice—most rebels.
Reading Lacan’s final seminars, it is as if the initiatory process of breaking
both himself and his audience in to the practice of knots became one of
the primary purposes of his public research.
Nonetheless, there remains, as he put it in Seminar XXV, a “gap between
the imaginary and the real which constitutes our inhibition” and, unfor-
tunately, knowing how “things”—that is, the real, the symbolic and the
imaginary as they are written in the combinatorial space-time of knots,
surfaces and cuts—“work” “supposes the use of what I called the imagi-
nary.”14 Lacan seems to be suggesting here that we can never entirely
close the gap that causes inhibition. However far we attempt to reduce
the imaginary of conscious thought, it remains necessary: “what passes
for being the least imagined depends all the same on the imaginary.”15
Thought often (pre)tends to obliterate the gap between R and I by either
jettisoning R (e.g. philosophy’s noumenal real beyond ideation), incor-
porating it (e.g. science’s modelling or “idea of the real”), mistaking I for
R (e.g. religion’s treatment of imaginary symbols as the real) or merging
the two (e.g. the biologist’s organicism which makes genes and chemicals
responsible for “dis-corps”). With the efficacy of psychoanalysis at stake,
it became vital for Lacan that he find and convey a different approach,
“a new imaginary.” This is what led him to the discourse of mathematics
(IRS) and eventually to knots; constructing a “symptomatic response” to
Freud that “partakes of an equivocation between” R and I, a writing that
both supports the real and can, as a teaching, be transmitted or, better,
given to readers who might willingly make themselves the dupe of it:
What must be clearly articulated, is that in this writing of the very knot—
because reflect carefully, this knot is only some strokes written on a board—
it is in this writing itself that there resides the happening [l’événement] of
my saying. My saying in so far as … I could pinpoint it by carrying out
what we could call édupation, if in fact it is by putting the stress on the fact
that the non dupes err, which does not prevent this from not meaning that
any old dupery does not err, but that it is by yielding to this dupery of a
271
writing in so far as it is correct, that there can be correctly situated the dif-
ferent themes of what emerges, emerges as meaning, precisely from analytic
discourse.16
If, in psychoanalysis, knowing how things work inevitably “supposes the

use of … the imaginary,” this imaginary will not be arrived at without a
decent édupation.
5.1 Notes
1. SXXII, 11/3/75.
2. Lacan, Autres écrits, p. 313.
3. SXIII, 8/6/66.
4. Le Gaufey, ‘Scholion’, p. 80.
5. SXXIII, p. 84.
6. SXXI, 13/11/73.
7. See: SVII, pp. 135–136.
8. SXXII, 13/5/75.
9. Ibid., 11/2/75.
10. SXXIII, p. 22.
11. Ibid., p. 124.
12. Lacan, ‘Massachusetts’, p. 6. Scilicet, pp. 59–60.
13. Sean Homer’s reference to Lacan’s “slightly insane ideas around the
Borromean knot” is exemplary in this regard. Sean Homer, Jacques
Lacan (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 135.
14. SXXV, 9/5/78.
15. Ibid.
16. SXXI, 8/1/74. We should nuance Lacan’s reference to the “emergence
of meaning” by noting that in the same seminar’s session he also states
that the analytic discourse—that is, the discourse in which the agent
makes himself the dupe of a writing—practices a “decanting of mean-
ing.” This verb has a pleasing ambiguity: meaning is brought out into
the open and aired but the place that produced it is simultaneously
emptied of meaning. As meaning emerges, it is reduced.
Bibliography
Adams, C. C. (2004). The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the

Mathematical Theory of Knots. Providence, RI: AMS.
Adams, D. (1988). Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. London: Pan.
Badiou, A. (2009). Theory of the Subject (B. Borsteels, Trans.). London:
Continuum.
Badiou, A., & Roudinesco, É. (2014). Jacques Lacan: Past and Present: A Dialogue
(J. E. Smith, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Bassols, M. (2002). The Analyst and his Politics. Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 8
(pp. 107–123). London.
Beckett, S. (1959). Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. London:
Calder Publications.
Beckett, S. (1990). Nohow on: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho. London:
Calder Publications.
Bowie, M. (1991). Lacan. London: Fontana Press.
Brini, J. (2014). De l’impossible correspondance entre noeuds et tresses. Retrieved
from topologie.2013.monsite-orange.fr/etudesborromeennes/index.html
Butler, J. (2007). Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge.
Chaitin, G. D. (1996). Rhetoric and Culture in Lacan. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

The Palgrave Lacan Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47533-2
274 Bibliography
Chiesa, L. (2007). Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan.

Cambridge: MIT Press.
Cochet, A. (2002). Nodologie Lacanienne. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Copjec, J. (1994). Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge:
MIT Press.
Darmon, M. (1990). Essais sur la Topologie lacanienne. Paris: Editions de
l’Association Freudienne.
Dauben, J. W. (1990). Georg Cantor: His Mathematics and Philosophy of the
Infinite. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dean, T. (2000). Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). London: Continuum.
Derrida, J. (1988). The Purveyor of Truth (A. Bass, Trans.). In J. P. Muller &
W. J. Richardson (Eds.), The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic
Reading (pp. 173–212). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (1992). Psyche: Invention of the Other. In D. Attridge (Ed.), Acts of
Literature (pp. 311–343). New York: Routledge.
Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London:
Routledge.
Eyers, T. (2012). Lacan and the Concept of the ‘Real’. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Felman, S. (1989). Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in
Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Fierens, C. (2002). Lecture de L’étourdit. Paris: L’Harmattan. Reading L’étourdit
(C. Gallagher, Trans.) Retrieved from www.lacaninireland.com.
Fink, B. (1995). The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fink, B. (2013). Translator’s Notes. In J. Lacan, On the Names-of-the-Father
(pp. 98–105). Cambridge: Polity.
Freud, S. (2001a). Studies on Hysteria. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 2; J. Strachey, Trans. & Ed.).
London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (2001b). The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part). In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 4;
J. Strachey, Trans. & Ed.). London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (2001c). The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part). In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 5;
Bibliography
275
Freud, S. (2001d). Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. In The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 10,
pp. 153–249; J. Strachey, Trans. & Ed.). London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (2001e). Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. In The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 11, pp. 3–55;
Freud, S. (2001f ). The Ego and the Id. In The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 3–66; J. Strachey, Trans. &
Ed.). London: Vintage.
Freud, S. (2001g). Negation. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 19, pp. 235–239; J. Strachey, Trans. & Ed.).
London: Vintage.
Georgin, J.-P., & Porge, E. (2010). Above the Horizon there is no Sky. The
Letter: Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 43 (pp. 53–77). Dublin.
Granon-Lafont, J. (1985). La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan. Paris: Points
hors Ligne.
Grigg, R. (2008). Lacan, Language and Philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press.
Harari, R. (2002). How James Joyce made his Name (L. Thurston, Trans.).
New York: Other Press.
Hilbert, D., & Cohen-Vossen, S. (1952). Geometry and the Imagination
(P. Nemenyi, Trans.). New York: Chelsea Publishing Company.
Hogan, P. C. (1990). Introduction: The Repression of Lacan. In P. C. Hogan &
L. Pandit (Eds.), Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language,
Structure, and the Unconscious (pp. xi–xx). London: University of Georgia
Press.
Homer, S. (2005). Jacques Lacan. London and New York: Routledge.
Hughes, T. (2010). The Torus—An Introduction. The Letter: Irish Journal for
Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 43 (pp. 79–105). Dublin.
Jameson, F. (2006). Lacan and the Dialectic: A Fragment. In S. Žižek (Ed.),
Lacan: The Silent Partners (pp. 365–397). London: Verso.
Johnston, A. (2015). Lacking Causes: Privative Causality from Locke and Kant
to Lacan and Deacon. In Speculations VI (pp. 19–60). Brooklyn, NY:
Punctum Books.
Joyce, J. (1939). Finnegans Wake. London: Faber.
Kant, I. (2007). Critique of Pure Reason (M. Weigelt, Trans.). London: Penguin.
Koyré, A. (1943). Galileo and Plato. Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 4
(pp. 400–428).
Lacan, J. (1966). Interview with Pierre Daix of 26 November, 1966. Retrieved
from http://aejcpp.free.fr/lacan/1966-11-26.htm
276 Bibliography
Lacan, J. (1967). Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the Psychoanalyst of the

School (R. Grigg, Trans.). Retrieved from http://iclo-nls.org/wp-content/
uploads/Pdf/Propositionof9October1967.pdf
Lacan, J. (1970a). Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to
Any Subject Whatever. In R. Macksey & E. Donato (Eds.), The Structuralst
Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (pp. 186–195).
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lacan, J. (1970b). Radiophonie (unoffical, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1971). Lituraterre (unoffical, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1972). L’étourdit (unoffical, J. W. Stone et al., Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1973). Introduction to the German Edition of the First Volume of
Écrits (unoffical, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1975a). Conferences in North American Universities: December 2,
1975 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (unoffical, J. W. Stone,
Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1975b). Conferences in North American Universities: Yale University:
Kanzer Seminar (unoffical, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1976). Conférences et entretians dans des universités nord-améric-
aines. Scilicet, nos. 6/7, 5–63.
Lacan, J. (1977a). Preface. In A. Lemaire (Ed.), Jacques Lacan (pp. vii–vxv).
London: RKP.
Lacan, J. (1977b). Préface à l’ ouvrage de Robert Georgin. In R. Georgin (Ed.),
Cahiers Cistre No. 3: Lacan (pp. 9–17). Paris: l’Age d’homme. Preface to the
Work of Robert Georgin (unoffical, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1981). Propos sur l’hysterie. Quarto: Supplement belge à la Lettre men-
suelle de l’École de la Cause Freudienne, no. 2, pp. 5–10. Remarks on Hysteria
(unofficial, J. W. Stone, Trans.).
Lacan, J. (1984). Conférence chez le Professeur Deniker, hôpital Sainte-Anne, le
10 novembre 1978. le Bulletin de l’Association freudienne, no. 7 (pp. 3–4).
Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory
and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.;
S. Tomaselli, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (1989). Geneva Lecture on the Symptom. In Analysis, no. 1 (pp. 7–26).
Melbourne: Centre for Psychoanalytic Research.
Lacan, J. (1990). Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
(D. Hollier, R. Krauss, J. Mehlman, & A. Michelson, Trans.). New York:
Norton.
Lacan, J. (1992). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; D. Porter, Trans.). New York:
Norton.
Bibliography
277
Lacan, J. (1993). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956.
SIII Psychoses (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; R. Grigg, Trans.). London: Routledge.
Lacan, J. (1994). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. Sheridan, Trans.). London:
Penguin.
Lacan, J. (1995). Spring Awakening (S. Rodriguez, Trans.). Analysis, no. 6,
32–34. Melbourne: Centre for Psychoanalytic Research.
Lacan, J. (1998). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973 (J.-
A. Miller, Ed.; B. Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (2001). Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits (B. Fink, Trans.). New York: Norton.
Lacan, J. (2008). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; R. Grigg, Trans.). New York:
Norton.
Lacan, J. (2011a). Je parle aux murs. Paris: Seuil.
Lacan, J. (2011b). Overture to the First International Encounter of the Freudian
Field, Caracas, 12 July 1980 (A. Price, Trans.). Hurly-Burly, no. 6, 17–22.
London: NLS.
Lacan, J. (2012a). Address on Child Psychoses (A. Price & B. Khiara-Foxton,
Trans.). Hurly-Burly, no. 8, 269–277. London: NLS.
Lacan, J. (2012b). Postface to Seminar XI (A. Price, Trans.). Hurly-Burly, no. 7
(pp. 17–21). London: NLS.
Lacan, J. (2013a). Columbia University: Lecture on the Symptom (A. Price &
R. Grigg, Trans.). In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus (Eds.), Culture/Clinic 1
(pp. 8–16). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lacan, J. (2013b). Yale University: Lecture on the Body (A. Price and R. Grigg,
Trans.). In J.-A. Miller & M. Jaanus (Eds.), Culture/Clinic 1 (pp. 5–7).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Lacan, J. (2013c). On the Names-of-the-Father (B. Fink, Trans.). Cambridge:
Polity.
Lacan, J. (2013d). The Triumph of Religion, Preceded by Discourse to Catholics
(B. Fink, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity.
Lacan, J. (2014). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X: Anxiety, 1962–1963 (J.-
A. Miller, Ed.; A. Price, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity.
Lacan, J. (2016a). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIII: The Sinthome,
1975–1976 (J.-A. Miller, Ed.; A. Price, Trans.). Cambridge: Polity.
Lacan, J. (2016b). Religions and the Real (R. Grigg, Trans.). In The Lacanian
Review, No. 1: Oh My God(s)! (pp. 8–14). London: NLS.
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book IX: Identification, 1961–1962.
Unedited (unofficial, C. Gallagher, Trans.).
278 Bibliography
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XII: Crucial Problems for
Psychoanalysis, 1964–1965. Unedited (unofficial, C. Gallagher, Trans.).
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis,
1965–1966. Unedited (unofficial, C. Gallagher, Trans.).
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIV: The Logic of Fantasy, 1966–1967.
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XV: The Psychoanalytic Act,
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVI: From an other to the Other,
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVIII: On a Discourse that might not
be a Semblant, 1970–1971. Unedited (unofficial, C. Gallagher, Trans.).
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XIX: Ou Pire…, 1971–1972.
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXI: Les non-Dupes Errent,
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXII: RSI, 1974–1975 (J.-A. Miller,
Ed.) (unofficial, J. W. Stone, et al., Trans.).
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXIV: l’insu que sait de l’une-bévue
s’aile à mourre, 1976–1977. Unedited (unofficial, C. Gallagher, Trans.).
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXV: The Moment to Conclude,
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXVI: La topologie et le temps,
1978–1979. Unpublished.
Lacan, J. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XXVII: Dissolution, 1980.
Unpublished.
Le Gaufey, G. (2011). The Scholion: A Misuse of Metaphor (C. Gallagher,
Trans.). The Letter: Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 47 (pp. 67–83).
Dublin.
Leupin, A. (2004). Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion. New York:
Other Press.
Marjorie, P. (2010). Beckett the Poet. In S. E. Gontarski (Ed.), A Companion to
Samuel Beckett (pp. 211–227). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Metzger, D. (2004). Interpretation and Topological Structure. In E. Ragland &
D. Milanovic (Eds.), Lacan: Topologically Speaking (pp. 134–149). New York:
Other Press.
Miller, J.-A. (1990). Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television.
In J. Lacan, Television/A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (pp.
xi–xxxi). New York: Norton.
Bibliography
279
Miller, J.-A. (1996). An Introduction to Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Orientation

Prior to 1953 (III). In R. Feldstein, B. Fink, & M. Jaanus (Eds.), Reading
Seminars I and II (pp. 26–35). Albany: SUNY Press.
Miller, J.-A. (2000). Paradigms of Jouissance (J. Jauregui, Trans.). Lacanian Ink
17: Aesthetics. (pp. 10–47). New York.
Miller, J.-A. (2003). Milanese Intuitions (T. Sowley, Trans.). Mental Online:
International Journal of Mental Health and Applied Psychoanalysis,12
(pp. 5–14).
Miller, J.-A. (2004). Mathemes: Topology in the Teaching of Lacan. In
E. Ragland & D. Milanovic (Eds.), Lacan: Topologically Speaking (pp. 28–48).
Miller, J.-A. (2007). Interpretation in Reverse. In V. Voruz & B. Wolf (Eds.),
The Later Lacan: An Introduction (pp. 3–9). Albany: SUNY Press.
Miller, J.-A. (2008). The Invention of Delusion (G. S. Marshall, Trans.).
International Lacanian Review, V, (pp. 1–29).
Miller, J.-A. (2009). Another Lacan (R. Chipman, Trans.). The Symptom 10.
Miller, J.-A. (2010). Two Clinical Dimensions: Symptom and Fantasm
(A. Alvarez, Trans.). The Symptom 11.
Milner, J.-C. (1991). Lacan and the Ideal of Science. In A. Leupin (Ed.), Lacan
and the Human Sciences (pp. 27–42). Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press.
Milner, J.-C. (1995). L’oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Paris: Seuil.
Nancy, J.-L., & Lacoue-Labarthe, P. (1992). The Title of the Letter: A Reading of
Lacan (F. Raffoul & D. Pettigrew, Trans.). Albany: SUNY Press.
Nasio, J.-D. (2004). Objet a and the Cross-cap. In E. Ragland & D. Milanovic
(Eds.), Lacan: Topologically Speaking (pp. 98–116). New York: Other Press.
Pluth, E. (2007). Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Price, A. (2014). In the Nebohood of Joyce and Lacan. LC Express, vol 2., issue
14.
Price, A. (2015). “I start off from the limit”: On the First Lesson of Seminar XX.
Encore. Lacunae, 11.
Rosen, S. M. (2006). Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of
the Lifeworld. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Roudinesco, É. (1997). Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of
Thought (B. Bray, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Russell, B. (1981). Mysticism and Logic. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books.
Sartre, J.-P. (2003). Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). London: Routledge.
280 Bibliography
Schneiderman, S. (1998). Art According to Lacan. Newsletter of the Freudian

Field, 2(1) (pp. 16–25).
Siboni, J. (2012). Jacques Lacan and the Projective Plane. Online video clip.
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGG85uY-Tk0
Stone, J. W. (1998). The Fantasy, Le Sinthome, and the “Babbling Pumpt of
Platinism”: From Geometry, to Topology, to Joyce. PhD thesis, University of
Missouri.
Thurston, L. (1998). Ineluctable Nodalities: On the Borromean Knot. In
D. Nobus (Ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (pp. 139–163).
Vandermersch, B. Pour introduire le cross-cap. Retieved from http://www.
freud-lacan.com/freud/Champs_specialises/Presentation/Le_cross_cap_de_
Lacan_ou_asphere
Weber, S. (2000). The Legend of Freud. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Wilson, S. (2008). The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Zupančič, A. (2011). Realism in Psychoanalysis. In L. Chiesa (Ed.), JEP:
European Journal of Psychoanalysis 32 (pp. 29–48). Milan: IPOC.
Index1
NUMBERS & SYMBOLS the ambassadors, 80, 92

Φ, 92–4, 139, 162, 166, 167, 175, America, 3, 33n15, 37, 40, 96n4,
180, 183, 186, 190 137, 269
Σ, 252, 254–8, 263n148, 268, 269 analyst’s discourse/analytic discourse,
58, 59, 184, 185, 190, 204,
271, 271n16
A anamorphosis, 80, 81
Adams, Colin C., 211, 259n26, Antigone, 116
262n97, 263n161 anti-philosophy, 265, 266, 269
affect, 13, 40, 73, 107, 127, 129, anxiety, 12, 115, 210, 249, 250, 252
138, 141, 162, 177, 206, 224, Aristotle/Aristotelian, 81, 82, 108,
232, 249, 255 115, 173, 244
agalma, 147, 171 armillary sphere, 242, 244
Aimee, 136, 137 asphere, 91, 93, 96, 145–7, 152,
Alberti, Leon Battista, 80 153, 179, 185–9, 191, 192,
alienation, 28, 41, 46, 66, 67, 69, 202n316, 226, 235, 241
74, 126, 189, 225, 246 atheism, 164, 267
Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote footnotes.

1

The Palgrave Lacan Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47533-2
282 Index
B Catullus, 230
Badiou, Alain, 10, 13, 34n20, centre/central, 38, 39, 41, 42, 71,
34n21, 34n32, 34n40, 77, 78–9, 89, 95, 112, 131, 132,
101n141, 203, 246 139, 142, 146–7, 150, 151,
Bahnungen, 120 165, 178, 179, 192n2, 240,
Balzac, Honoré de, 9 256, 260n60
bar, 54–7, 59, 93, 116, 150, 151, chaînoeud, 235–7
159, 162, 163, 233, 250 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 195n88, 216,
barred subject, 42–4, 52, 67, 105, 260n38
110, 142, 143, 175, 210, 216, Chomsky, Noam, 29, 30
233, 235, 256 Christianity/Christian, 127, 230
Beckett, Samuel, 105, 112, 192n5, circle, 13, 14, 17, 25–8, 43, 48, 51,
193n43, 220, 260n59 54, 55, 66, 69–72, 83, 86, 95,
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 174 110, 115, 126, 129, 143, 146,
binary logic, 222, 223, 225, 246, 150–2, 163, 165, 167, 169,
248, 249 179–2, 186, 219, 228, 238,
body, 8, 14, 18, 25, 38–41, 65, 241, 242, 247, 251, 253, 254,
97n10, 142, 146, 149, 192, 256, 257, 269
208, 210, 230, 231, 238–40, clearing (déblayage), 19, 21, 23, 205
245, 250, 251, 255, 262n104, cogito, 24, 44, 108, 235
262n111, 268 Copernicus/Copernican, 39, 142,
Borromean knot, 4, 5, 8, 12, 15, 16, 146, 147, 150, 151
19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 90, Copjec, Joan, 77, 79, 81–3,
114, 132, 133, 168, 203–63, 101n143, 101n148, 101n149,
269, 271n13 101n152, 101n156, 201n282
Bowie, Malcolm, 3, 6, 24, 25, 27, cosmos/cosmological, 20, 39, 146,
30, 33n6, 35n67, 35n70 147, 150, 151, 153, 174, 187,
braid, 231, 232, 261n89 217, 228, 240–2, 256
Breuer, Josef, 117 courtly love, 230
Butler, Judith, 3, 33n5 cross-cap, 71, 79–102, 108, 131,
139, 152, 163, 165–7, 177,
180, 185, 186, 188, 189,
C 202n316, 214, 234, 266
Cantor, Georg, 184, 202n311, cut, 6, 8, 26, 40, 49, 52–4, 56–9,
202n312 61, 64–6, 69, 71, 74, 86, 91,
cartel, 15, 16, 213 94, 95, 116, 127, 134, 141,
castration, 74, 75, 90, 92, 127, 130, 144–7, 164, 176, 178–89,
143, 144, 152, 154–7, 159–64, 211, 213, 220, 226,
166, 167, 173, 174, 182, 183, 235, 242, 245, 257,
190–2, 211, 234–7, 240 258, 267, 270
Index 283
D Dolto, Françoise, 21, 35n57

das ding, 72–6, 78, 79, 89, 90, 107, Dora, 23, 157, 158, 168, 267
110, 129, 143, 166, 230, 239, double inscription, 57, 58, 187
249 dream, 11–13, 31, 36n95, 40, 75,
Dean, Tim, 152, 153, 198n199 99n71, 111, 121, 123, 148,
death, 10, 11, 13–15, 18, 78, 109, 158, 159, 168, 169, 182, 183,
158, 159, 217, 230, 231 185, 199n226
déblayage, 1–36, 267 Dream of Irma’s Injection, 168
Deleuze, Gilles, 129, 150, 153, 166, drive, 13, 14, 73, 115, 128, 129, 144,
198n191, 198n201 162, 207–9, 239, 240, 255
delusion, 129, 133–40, 144, 147, dupe, 164, 214, 217, 267–71,
156, 165, 166, 196n133, 271n16
196n134, 196n137, 197n143,
235, 236, 244
demand, 66–72, 74, 111, 125, 127, E
130, 132, 133, 157, 179–86, ego, 6, 7, 15, 28, 37–41, 47, 50, 51,
189, 206, 211, 213, 226, 230, 76, 77, 89, 91, 96, 114, 115,
234, 257 117, 118, 120, 121, 138, 139,
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 30, 33n16, 89, 142, 143, 146, 147, 166–8,
103–5, 109, 111, 114, 133, 172, 189, 192, 205–7, 223,
192n1, 194n52, 244, 233, 235, 239–42, 246, 258,
245, 250 267, 270
Desargues, Girard, 80, 81, 83, 84, ego psychology, 37, 39, 89, 120,
184, 241 121, 138, 172, 189, 206,
Descartes/Cartesian, 63, 80, 108, 170, 207, 233
171, 242, 243, 245, 246, 268 elementary phenomena/
desire, 9–12, 16, 24, 45, 52, 66–77, phenomenon, 134–7, 139,
79, 91–3, 96, 101n149, 108, 140, 166
129–31, 139, 147, 149, 155, empty set, 42, 246
158–62, 165, 170, 172, Entwurf, 72, 119, 120, 141
179–86, 188–90, 200n282, Euclid, 63, 69, 79, 82–5, 90, 95,
208, 209, 211, 213, 217, 221, 165, 206–8, 235–7, 243,
226, 230, 231, 239, 251, 252, 251, 270
254, 255, 257, 267 Evans, Dylan, 56, 98n65
dialectic, 68, 142, 145, 183, 222, extimate/extimacy, 78, 79, 89, 95,
223, 226, 227, 260n64 108, 112, 132, 147, 152, 155,
dit-mension, 145, 165, 184, 185, 156, 165, 206, 239, 242, 257
224, 243, 255 Eyers, Tom, 59, 99n73
284 Index
F 172, 206, 207, 222, 225, 233,

fantasy, 79, 91, 93, 96, 98n44, 108, 235, 237, 238, 242, 243,
109, 111, 139, 140, 145, 147, 253, 269
170, 174, 185, 187, 190, 191, Gide, André, 6
197n148, 197n152, God, 42, 81, 97n16, 108, 109, 129,
197n156, 235 171, 176, 215, 216
Felman, Shoshana, 113, 194n48 good form, 38, 39, 41, 43, 47, 55,
feminine jouissance, 174 60, 63, 141, 142, 144, 146,
Fierens, Christian, 106, 107, 164, 147, 149, 150, 179, 183, 187,
180, 184, 192n9, 192n10, 219, 240, 255, 269
200n248, 201n298, 202n313 graph, 52, 172
Fink, Bruce, 10n103, 21, 33n7, 35n54, Grigg, Russell, 97n10, 97n16, 158,
35n56, 67, 73, 91, 97n15, 174, 192n2, 199n221,
100n119, 102n171, 102n173, 200n249, 201n275
100n124, 170, 200n262 Guattari, Félix, 129, 150, 153, 166,
Flatland, 178, 179, 181–3, 187, 212 198n191, 198n201
foreclosure/foreclosed, 11, 13, 84, gut-torus, 239, 240, 245, 255
134, 135, 137, 138, 166, 171,
251–2
formalisation, 6, 41, 45, 46, 82, 89, H
97n28, 138, 141, 142, 149, Haken, Wolfgang, 212
150, 152, 155, 156, 162, 166, Hamlet, 12
175, 178, 213, 226, 229, 238, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
239, 266, 267 150, 151
Foucault, Michel/Foucauldian, 80 Heidegger, Martin, 150
Freud, Sigmund, 2–4, 11, 12, 14, Hobbes, Thomas, 217
15, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30–2, Hogan, Patrick Colm, 1, 4, 8,
36n95, 40, 73, 76, 78, 96, 17, 33n1, 33n2,
99n71, 103–202, 205–9, 215, 33n13, 267
221, 255, 266–70 Holbein, Hans, 80
Hopf link, 229
hypokeimenon, 51, 52, 60, 67, 267
G Hyppolite, Jean, 120, 122, 124–6
Galileo, 149, 198n182, 198n193 hysterical neurotic/hysteria/hysteric,
gay sçavoir, 128 35n55, 36n93, 40, 61n102,
gaze, 79, 80, 92 68, 117, 142, 143, 149, 157,
generalised Borromean, 258 158, 169, 171, 189, 194n65,
geometry, 25, 26, 38, 40, 45, 49, 55, 194n66, 226,
63, 69–71, 80–6, 98n44, 162, 259n8, 261n90
Index 285
I J
Ich-spaltung, 117, 118 Jakobson, Roman, 29, 230
Id, 15, 77, 118, 205, 207 Jameson, Fredric, 222, 223, 260n64
idealinguistery, 77, 138, 176 Johnston, Adrian, 62, 99n89
imaginary, 7, 15, 19, 20, 22, 26, 28, Jouissance, 73–7, 90, 100n103, 108,
29, 31, 35n54, 35n57, 35n58, 111, 127, 128, 130, 138–40,
35n62, 36n101, 38–41, 47, 142–5, 152, 155, 156, 159,
51, 65, 71, 80, 82, 91–3, 96, 160, 162–4, 167, 174, 186,
121, 122, 129, 142, 144, 190–2, 197n151, 209–11,
146–8, 151–3, 156, 158, 163, 214, 216, 217, 230, 231,
165–7, 172, 175, 177, 182, 233–6, 239, 240, 243,
183, 185, 190, 205, 206, 208, 250–2, 254–8
210, 214–16, 218, 219, 221, Joyce, James, 60, 98n44, 99n76,
223, 224, 226, 228, 229, 231, 99n77, 137, 197n145, 217,
235, 237, 238, 240–2, 244, 241, 252, 253, 258, 259n27,
246, 248–50, 255, 256, 258, 260n44, 263n158
265–71 Jung, Carl, 30
impossibility, 2, 11, 21, 24, 25, 29, 47,
49, 51, 71, 72, 87, 112, 113,
119, 123, 124, 129–31, 139–41, K
144, 149–51, 154–6, 162, 176, Kant, Immanuel, 6, 62–5, 69, 83,
177, 190, 191, 208, 213, 221, 99n89, 100n109
225, 238, 254, 255, 268 Kepler, Johannes, 146, 147
impotence/impotent, 130, 142–4, Klein bottle, 163, 164, 192, 208, 266
155, 157, 159, 175, 182, Koyré, Alexandre, 149, 198n182,
190, 191 198n183
infinite straight line, 16, 26, 229,
241, 250, 251, 256, 269
infinity, 16, 17, 24–28, 30, 31, 42, L
48, 57, 75–7, 79, 81–4, 86, lack-of-being, 41, 42, 44, 51, 53, 54,
88, 90, 93, 101n135, 108, 59, 65, 66, 69, 179
155, 173, 178, 179, 184, Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 150–2,
202n311, 218, 229, 241, 243, 165, 198n186, 198n187,
244, 251, 256, 269 198n192, 198n195, 245
inhibition, 2, 7, 15, 113, 210, lalangue, 59, 60, 105, 106, 137, 141,
249–2, 269, 270 191, 209, 252, 254, 256, 258
The Interpretation of Dreams, 31, l'âme à tiers, 232–40
36n95, 99n71, 158, 169, Las Meninas, 84, 92
199n226 Leclaire, Serge, 265
286 Index
Le Gaufey, Guy, 227, 261n75, 140, 141, 148, 156, 159, 166,
261n77, 267, 271n4 168, 175, 211, 213, 251, 267
letter, 3, 36n91, 56, 58, 59, 78, metalanguage, 46, 47, 115, 119,
83, 97n19, 97n28, 101n158, 169, 171, 191
105, 106, 110, 122, 126, 128, metaphor, 5, 6, 25, 26, 29–32, 39,
132, 136, 140, 147–52, 156, 44, 45, 52, 55–9, 73, 79, 93,
158, 175, 176, 184, 187, 134, 137, 141, 142, 147,
198n186, 198n187, 148, 150, 156, 162, 177,
198n192, 198n195, 210, 209, 215, 220, 223, 226,
213, 217–19, 221, 228, 245, 229, 246–9, 253,
256, 257, 261n75, 267 261n75, 269
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 155 metonymy/metonymic, 56, 57, 59,
linguisterie, 89, 132, 191, 266 66, 67, 72, 74, 93, 137, 147,
logic of fantasy, 108, 109, 139 150, 156, 158, 159, 162, 173,
logic of sexuation, 108, 150, 156, 179, 182, 191, 209, 217, 225,
161–74, 191, 226, 227 231, 233, 245,
love, 129, 130, 176, 180, 223, 226, 254, 255, 269
229–31 Metzger, David, 5, 33n8
L schema, 91, 172 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 5, 8, 33n9, 44,
l’une-bévue, 32, 47, 105, 224 61, 97n10, 97n27, 97n29,
97n31, 99n85, 127–41, 154,
166, 188, 196n131,
M 196n133–4, 196n137,
masochism/masochistic, 231 196n139, 196n141, 196n143,
master, 10, 39, 40, 46, 58, 59, 74, 196n146, 196n148, 196n149,
76, 79–81, 92, 97n11, 108, 197n151, 197n152,
110, 142–6, 149, 156–61, 197n156, 197n157
187, 190, 214, 235, 239, 245, Milner, Jean-Claude, 102n164, 112,
256 193n44
master’s discourse, 58, 59, 142–5, mirror stage, 38, 39, 142, 239
156, 187 Möbius strip/Möbian, 33, 46–63,
master-signifier, 59, 143, 145, 146, 65, 67, 70, 71, 79, 85–90,
235, 245, 256 92–5, 104–6, 114–27, 129,
materialism/materiality, 60, 105, 131, 132, 136, 145, 147, 152,
136, 137, 175–7, 192, 233, 153, 159–61, 165, 166, 169,
237–9, 247, 253, 255 170, 179–81, 183–9, 192,
mathematical discourse, 228 211, 235, 266
matheme, 13, 33n9, 44, 93, myth, 12, 34n26, 96, 127, 150,
97n27–9, 97n31, 111, 134, 154–61, 165, 166, 177, 229
Index 287
N O
name-of-the-father, 13, 73, 134, object a, 24, 39, 62, 63, 91–6, 108,
137, 163–8, 215–17, 249, 115, 127, 129, 139, 140, 145,
250, 253, 254 147, 156, 169–2, 174, 183–5,
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 150–2, 165, 189, 190, 210, 215, 216, 231,
198n186–7, 198n192, 234, 247, 251
198n195, 245 obsessional neurotic/obsessional, 68,
Nasio, Juan-David, 87–9, 101n160, 107, 156, 182, 183, 185, 186,
101n161, 102n165, 189, 192n11, 210, 211, 214,
102n167, 102n182 215, 217, 226, 267, 268
nature, 48, 54, 65, 81, 95, 110, 118, Oedipus at Colonus, 1–17
136, 138, 142, 172, 175–7, Oedipus Rex, 12, 159
180, 217, ontology, 7, 22, 28, 29, 70, 92,
224, 239, 244 97n30, 131, 151, 192, 233,
necessity, 11, 54, 69, 86, 112, 114, 234, 237, 244–6, 250, 268
139, 165, 187, 190, 231 orientation/orientable, 12, 48, 73,
negative ontology, 245, 246, 268 75, 116–18, 123, 187, 226–9,
negative theology, 151 266, 269
neurosis/neurotic (broadly (m)Other, 67–9, 73, 74, 93, 234
conceived), 1, 7, 21, 35n75,
68, 73, 75, 78, 127, 134–7,
139, 148, 149, 156, 159, 162, P
164, 166, 174, 179, 180, 182, paranoia/paranoid, 137, 236
183, 185, 186, 189, 192n11, phallic function, 93, 95, 130, 151,
215, 217, 226, 231, 161, 162, 173, 174, 184,
235, 252, 253 185, 191
Newton, Isaac, 63, 147, 148,156, 216 phallic jouissance, 130, 174, 216,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 108 234, 240, 254
Nixon, Richard, 3, 33-4n16, phallic signification, 93, 95, 130,
102n169 134, 162, 186, 252
not-all (pas-tout), 17, 27, 111, 112, phallic signifier, 75, 76, 95, 139,
173, 174, 216, 184, 240, 258
221, 241, 245 phallus, 5, 73, 93, 95, 139, 162, 166,
noumena/noumenon/noumenal, 174, 182, 183, 185, 235
140, 219, 220, 247, 270 philosophy, 10, 89, 104, 109, 151,
nullibiquity/nullibiquitous, 49, 88, 152, 199n221, 201n275,
131, 152, 163, 206 202n311, 265, 266, 269, 270
288 Index
physics/physicist, 148, 175–7, 225 religion, 35n74, 97n15–16, 217,

Picasso, Pablo, 110, 125 228, 270
plane, 25, 30, 44, 69–71, 79, 81, religious discourse, 163, 228
83–7, 90, 95, 101n158, renaissance painting/perspective, 11,
102n168, 121, 165, 179, 222, 56, 69, 70, 80–2, 85, 165,
223, 241 173, 174, 239
Plato, 64, 198n182–3 repetition, 66, 67, 77, 105–16, 118,
pleasure principle, 74, 76, 90, 91, 120, 121, 124, 127, 133, 134,
108, 186, 257 139, 143, 151, 156, 161, 162,
Pluth, Ed, 54, 57, 98n58, 99n68–9 164, 169, 170, 181, 184, 187,
Poe, Edgar Allan, 33n16, 83 190, 202n312, 210, 240,
Poincaré, Henri, 178 256, 267
point at infinity, 25, 27, 30, 48, 75, 77, resistance, 7, 71, 121, 126, 157, 169,
81, 83, 84, 86, 90, 101n135, 237, 238, 243, 245, 247
184, 241, 251, 256, 269 re-turn, 103–202, 209, 267, 269
politics, 133, 142, 144, 197n155, revolution, 141–53, 158
200n254 Rosen, Steven M., 153, 198n200
post-structuralism, 5, 95, 138, 153, Roudinesco, Élisabeth, 8–10, 12, 14,
176, 237, 244 15, 33n14, 34n18–21, 34n32,
Price, Adrian, 14, 34n41, 97n10, 34n40, 140, 141, 197n154
98n48, 173, 196n112, R schema, 166–8
201n274, 212, 259n27, Russell, Bertrand, 148, 198n180
263n158
projective geometry, 81–4
projective plane, 79, 84, 86, 87, S
101n158, 102n168, 165, 241 S1, 42, 43, 46, 58, 59, 64, 69, 76,
psychosis, 134–7, 166, 192, 252, 258 105, 107, 114, 134–7, 139,
142, 143, 145, 157, 158, 184,
186, 268
R S2, 42, 43, 58, 59, 76, 105, 107,
Rabelais, François, 21, 35n57, 148, 134–9, 142, 143, 145, 146,
198n186 156, 158, 186, 268
radius, 41 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 44, 97n30
Ratman, 107 Saussure, 54–7, 59, 89, 123, 150, 245
real-of-the-structure, 30, 48, 49, 57, Schneiderman, Stuart, 42, 97n19
60, 71, 75, 83, 88, 141, 154, Schreber, 165
159, 180, 204, 220 science, 32, 35n74, 38, 39, 69, 88,
Reidemeister moves, 258 102n164, 102n169, 104, 128,
Index 289
147–9, 155, 167, 169, 171, 175, superego, 15, 142, 205, 206
176, 191, 193n44, 209, 216, symbolic, 7, 13, 15, 19, 20, 22, 26,
217, 233, 251, 265, 266, 270 31, 35n54, 35n57, 35n58,
scientific discourse, 148, 149 35n62, 36n101, 44, 46, 50,
semblance/semblant, 184, 189–91 51, 53, 65, 71, 72, 82, 83,
separation, 58, 66, 67, 116, 165, 186 91–3, 112, 134, 139, 151,
set, 14, 26, 28, 40, 42, 45, 72, 76, 152, 155, 158, 162, 165–7,
96, 115, 172–4, 177, 184, 172, 175, 183, 185, 205, 206,
190, 202n312, 212, 222, 224, 210, 215–19, 221, 223, 225,
241, 246, 247, 256 226, 228, 234, 237, 239, 241,
sexual relationship, 12, 14, 29, 129, 244, 246, 248, 250, 251,
130, 139, 140, 144, 154–7, 253–5, 268, 270
162, 172, 184, 185, 190, 192, symptom, 1, 4, 7, 8, 75, 90, 113,
215, 221, 226, 227, 229, 250, 114, 133, 162, 164, 192,
253, 255, 256, 261n75 192n2, 196n131, 197n145,
sign, 10, 54–6, 89, 123, 156, 216, 245 197n148–9, 197n152,
signifier, 13, 24, 25, 38, 40–67, 69, 197n156, 204, 205, 210, 214,
70, 72–7, 90, 91, 93–5, 105, 216, 217, 249, 250, 252–7,
116, 118, 119, 122, 128, 266, 267, 270
130–2, 135, 136, 138, 139,
141–3, 145–7, 149–52, 155,
157–9, 162, 164, 167, 170–2, T
175, 183–7, 208, 209, 216, ternary logic, 223, 224, 245, 249
217, 221, 225, 231, 233, 235, theoria, 18–20, 22, 29, 204, 212
236, 240, 244, 245, 248, 250, Thomé, Michel, 16, 227
254, 255, 257, 258 topography/topographical, 15, 16,
sin, 127, 128, 236, 237, 240, 48, 58, 78, 88, 112, 119, 138,
241, 256 163, 203–12, 239, 255, 269
sinthome, 98n44, 216, 229, 252, topologerie, 89, 95, 132, 141, 153,
253, 256, 258, 268 172, 191, 266
slave, 40, 97n11, 144 torus/tori/toric, 5, 7, 36n91, 62–79,
Soury, Pierre, 9 87, 95, 96, 163, 178–83,
Spaltung, 114, 117, 118, 121, 122, 125, 185–9, 212, 226, 227,
127, 129, 133, 137, 143–5, 151, 237–40, 245, 247, 255, 257
156, 157, 161, 192 Totem and Taboo, 154, 161, 191
specular, 91–3, 121, 166, 167, 204 transcendental aesthetics, 6, 62, 63,
sphere, 208, 219, 220, 239–41, 244 65, 69, 71, 240
S/s, 54, 55, 89, 233, 245 transference, 18, 115, 189, 190, 232
sublimation, 7, 101n143, 230, 268 transfinite, 184, 202n312
290 Index
trauma, 3, 73–7, 90, 96, 107, 113, Velázquez, Diego, 84, 92

114, 208, 211, 239, 252 Venn diagram, 205
traversal of fantasy, 174, 185, 190 Verneinung/negation, 91, 120–2,
truth, 2, 3, 9, 11–14, 17, 19, 24, 124, 147, 174, 195n80, 220
33n16, 105, 107, 119, 120, Vincennes, 265, 266
124, 128, 130, 143–6, 149, Vinci, Leonardo da, 79, 82
151, 155–8, 160, 169–72, voice, 208–10, 239, 240
175, 177, 185, 190, 221, 224, Vorstellung, 75
257, 266
W
U Wahrnehmungszeichen, 119, 120
unary trait, 256 wedging, 73, 101n135, 234–8, 240,
universal, 12, 13, 30, 42, 62–4, 108, 242, 243, 245, 247, 252,
127, 144, 145, 159, 161, 173, 256, 258
174, 190, 215, 235, 244 Wilson, Scott, 140, 197n155
universe, 42, 76, 83, 108, 144, 173, wisdom, 217, 254
174, 191, 224, 242 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 11, 23,
Urverdrängung, 47, 65, 66, 72, 74, 112, 131
75, 105, 124, 245, 254, 256
Z
V Žižek, Slavoj, 133, 260n64
vanishing point, 80–3, 86, 95, Zupančič, Alenka, 123, 176, 186,
165–7, 200n254, 233 195n88, 195n90, 201n284

Greenshields Writing The Structures of The Subject PDF

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Greenshields Writing The Structures of The Subject PDF

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

HOOK

More information about this series at

The Palgrave Lacan Series

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016958740

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image © Emmanuel LATTES / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Sussex and the AHRC

2 The Topology of the Psychoanalytic Subject 37

3 Topology and the Re-turn to Freud 103

3.7 The Topology of Interpretation 175

4 The Borromean Knot 203

5 Conclusion: A New Imaginary 265

Lacan’s published seminars are referenced by number followed by page

Fig. 1.1 The Borromean knot 4

Fig. 2.5 The tori of subject and Other 68

1.1 Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas

© The Author(s) 2017 1

A failure then, but thereby, actually, a success when compared … with

[W]here Freud cultivates clarity in the presentation of his ideas, Lacan

It was surely this unlikely mixture of illegibility and a claim to clarity

reference to a torus or “ring” which was accompanied by the provocative

representation from their continental thinkers—also straightforwardly

In Seminar XXIV Lacan followed a demonstration of what occurs when

in order to be a psychoanalyst?” he replied that “[t]opology is not some-

psychoanalytically ensured sanity: “I am psychotic simply because I have

In an illuminating dialogue with Alain Badiou, Roudinesco suggests

[Lacan] impose[d] on whoever listen[ed] to him this terminal, final unrav-

Will I manage to tell you—it oughtn’t to be merely a dream—what would

No praxis is more orientated towards that which, at the heart of experience,

Freud had produced something meaningful: with the Oedipus complex,

As Badiou’s eulogy suggests, Lacan engineered a way out of this impasse—

we might also be mindful of an alternative translation of sens as direc-

Unlike Freud, Lacan leaves nothing as a legacy. He undoes what he built by

It’s worth remembering that Freud’s “heritage” was endangered precisely

And yet…“[i]n other words, I persevere.”36 If Lacan’s experimental

While we will reserve a more sustained examination of the merits of topol-

something quite different; it has no legal, institutional or formal basis.

If Lacan’s second sentence (“…taking my bearings…”) recalls the chal-

1.2 Theory and the Real

as a theory of the textual or authorial unconscious—is confronted with

terms (imaginary, symbolic and real). If each term is presented by a ring,

(“the impossible to say”); this impossibility is its negatively defined essence.

[M]ust someone be neurotic in order to be a good analyst? A little bit neu-

“I write … insofar as I feel I must, in order to be on a level [au pair] with

“I presented something which concerned Dora and then little Hans … I

“The Borromean knot is a writing. This writing supports a real.”66

To this, we might add a mantra; a rephrasing of Wittgenstein’s famous

Whereof one cannot theorise, thereof one must present.

1.3 Consistence and Ex-sistence

(1) Lacan’s discourse, as a theory of desire is itself animated by theory’s desire.

If the form in which theory’s destiny is realised markedly differs between

geometry can entertain continuous deformation (expansion or contrac-

to theologians (e.g. the spirit or soul). The real, we recall, is neither an

While it cannot be directly apprehended, it has effects and it is through

Like the psychoanalytic subject, each knot, in simultaneity with its

if so inclined, perform a stylistic exercise and regard it as a fine charac-

nebulous definitions and, indeed, the very word itself (unconscious) is

subject as distinct from the subject of conscious self-apprehension and

46. Jacques Lacan, ‘Conférence chez le Professeur Deniker, hôpital Sainte-

75. Lacan’s parodic uncertainty over whether an analyst should be slightly or

2.1 The Sphere

2 The Topology of the Psychoanalytic Subject 37

3 Topology and the Re-turn to Freud 103

3.7 The Topology of Interpretation 175

4 The Borromean Knot 203

5 Conclusion: A New Imaginary 265

Fig. 1.1 The Borromean knot 4

Fig. 2.5 The tori of subject and Other 68

1.1 Oedipus at Colonus, Lacan at Caracas

1.2 Theory and the Real

1.3 Consistence and Ex-sistence

2.1 The Sphere

2.2 The Interior Eight

2.3 The Möbius Strip

2.4 The Torus

initial establishment of the gravitation of unconscious Vorstellungen,”130

r edoubling of lines-without-points. The line errantly redoubles itself and

2.5 The Cross-cap