Translated by Scott Savaino, Badiou’s “The Formulas of l’Étourdit” was first published in lacanian ink 27 – out of print – the Spring of 2006.
Clearly the word “formulas” in the title “The Formulas of l’Étourdit” needs to be heard in two senses. The first is quite obviously as in the mathematical formulas inherent to the expression “formulas of sexuation.” But then the second is as in Rimbaud’s poetic sense: “The place and the wording came to me” (J’ai trouvé le lieu et la formule). The relation between these two meanings must be thought through. How can a formula figure in the registers of both the matheme and the existence of a subject?
It is often said that psychoanalysis in general, and Lacan in particular, play on equivocations in the signifier. It is also said that Lacan completely de-ontologizes the comprehension of language because the equivocation of the signifier, and the plurality of interpretations that result, destroy one of the most fundamental conceptions of philosophical ontology from Aristotle to Deleuze, which holds that being is univocal. But formulas contradict this point of view, because a formula is a univocal proposition so absolute that its literal universality is immediate.
Even though for Lacan the course of the analytic cure runs through the realm of equivocation, we know its ultimate aim is a knowledge (savoir) that is wholly transmissible, without remainder. The aim is to heed a commandment to symbolize or, as he put it, to fashion an “exact formalization,” without a trace of equivocation.
I would like therefore to situate my remarks with respect to a difficult question: How is the passage in psychoanalysis made from linguistic equivocation to something—the formula, formalization – that is at once both its borderline and negation? What precisely is this hole in equivocal language that beckons the void of the univocal to the surface? I want to situate myself within this question of the hole that formulaic univocality bores into the hermeneutics of equivocation, because I believe this is where l’Étourdit is also fundamentally situated.
A sizable portion of l’Étourdit is devoted to the question of the matheme, and the issue of mathematical relations. Lacan is clearly touching upon the key point when he asks himself how, in the cure, to make the passage from impotence (Imaginary) to impossibility (Real). As the text makes clear, this relation is unintelligible if we do not ask ourselves what a formalization is.
The only direct quote from l’Étourdit I shall make, and which everything I am going to say will be a commentary on, is on page 8 or 452, depending on the edition. Here it is:
Freud steered us onto the path to the effect that ab-sense assigns sex: A topology in which the word is what is decisive
is laid out when this ab-sex sense becomes inflated.
Freud nous met sur la voie de ce que l’ab-sens désigne
le sexe: c’est à la gonfle de ce sens ab-sexe qu’une
topologie se déploie où c’est le mot qui tranche
For the moment I shall leave this quotation to shine in the obscurity of its letter, and will instead say what my guiding thread is going to be. My guiding thread is going to be, as always, Lacan’s relation to philosophy. Ultimately this is the only thing that interests me. This examination will be based on the following conceptual triplet: truth, knowledge (savoir), Real. My argument is that l’Étourdit is a proposition that creates a disjuncture between analytic discourse and philosophical discourse, based on their two entirely different ways of joining together this grouping of truth-knowledge-Real – a triplet which in truth could be said, assuming we keep it in the right order, to be in itself common to the discourses of both the philosopher and the analyst. This triplet is indeed the borderline between two discourses.
What, in Lacan’s eyes, is the true nature of how philosophy operates? What does Lacan identify as “philosophical,” in order for his anti-philosophy to assume its full meaning? Philosophy operates, in Lacan’s eyes, by affirming that there is such a thing as a meaning or sense of truth (sens de la vérité). But why would philosophy maintain this? Because its objective, the consolation it offers us, and which goes by the name “wisdom,” is to be able to assert that there is a truth of the Real. This is its implicit or explicit axiom: there is a sense to truth because there is a truth of the Real. However, in l’Étourdit Lacan argued, contrary to what he judges to be the way philosophy operates, and against even what he himself at times maintained prior to it, namely that there is no sense to truth whatsoever because there is no truth of the Real. L’Étourdit’s main argument is that the Real serves as the basis of a function of knowledge only, which exists but is not of the order of the truth as such.
In l’Étourdit the Real is clearly definable based on the absence of sense. The result of this is that the truth-knowledge-Real triplet must be juggled around a bit with respect to the question of sense, if we are to be able to think it through completely. In her brilliant commentary on Book Gamma of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Barbara Cassin speaks of a “decision of sense,” and it could be said that l’Étourdit is another kind of sense decision, different from the Aristotelian one. With respect to this decision, the Real may be defined as a sense which is ab-sense. The Real is ab-sense, and therefore an absence of sense, but which absence of course implies that sense does exist.
The point that needs to be understood, as concerns the complex decision Lacan is formulating here, is that ab-sense must be held absolutely distinct from nonsense. Lacan’s argument is not absurdist or in a general sense existentialist. He is not asserting that the Real is nonsense. He is asserting that an opening onto the Real cannot be breached save through the presupposition that it is an absence in sense, an ab-sense, or a subtracting of something from, or out of, sense. Everything depends on this distinction between ab-sense and non-sense.
Why does this entire issue impact the disentangling of psychoanalysis and philosophy in the most fundamental way? Basically because the distinction between absence and nonsense cannot be envisioned save in its correlation with sex, and more specifically in its correlations with what constitutes the Real of the unconscious, that there is no sexual relation. Sex determines, rather “nakedly” I daresay, the Real as impossibility itself: the impossibility of the relation. The impossible, the Real I mean, is thus correlated with ab-sense, and in particular with the absence of any kind of relation, meaning the absence of any kind of sense of sexuality (sens sexuel). The entire process follows a logical genealogy: based on the fact that sense is ab-sense, the Real may be designated as impossibility itself, and this is why one of the synonyms for ab-sense in Lacan’s text is ab-sex sense. “Ab-sex sense” is a formula, the one which says that there is no sexual relation. It is of tantamount importance for it to be clearly understood that these negative expressions (“there is no” and “there is ab-sense”) are ultimately equivalent to the non-negative formula “ab-sex sense.”