Jacques Lacan 1

 Jacques Lacan. 2018. Seminar XIX . . . Or Worse [1971-1972]. Polity.  

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It is difficult to read Lacan, and his writings are still apt to continuous and rich interpretations. Here, I am interpreting his Seminar . . . Or Worse. His main idea is about how things exist, what the real is. To elaborate more, let us start with some examples, naive questions. Why do we have two sexes, man and woman? Why do we have two statuses, death and life? Why do we have  two types of "times," day and night? Why do not we have only one sex, one status, and one period of time? The Lacanain logic answers this type of questions, accoridng to my understanding and interpretation. 

Let us start with the example of day and night. 

There is something that is mysterious, that is essentially far from our ability to grasp, something which is neither night nor day, neither dark nor luminous. This "something" cannot be grasped because it is the One, the One that includes, has, commands, generates the entire signifiers and significance; the One is the All as well, which the entire significances are in it. In other words, this something, this One signifies itself (behind our ability to grasp and see) in the signifiers of day and night together, at the same time.  This One is the Real. The Real, therefore, is impossible to be represented, to exist as it is in its reality, full reality. 

However, the One (which is neither day nor night) needs to exist, to emerge; it wants to free its signifiers. How? It exists but not through its Being (i.e., its full reality as not day and not night, as the One), but through its inexistence. 

 

The One is "that which exists but through not being" (p.117)

For the One to allude to itself, a Subject should exist. This subject is Day. (Any subject, either Day, you, or man exists qua signifier as Lacan asserts; in other words, every subject signifies itself and the One to another subject).  Then Day, as a subject, emerges. Day is a signifier that has light; in a more formal way of speaking, Day justifies the function of light. However, because Day is only half true (it is not the One), it needs another subject, the Other to exist. Can we imagine a Day without something that is not day, Night? No! The Other is a subject that does NOT have light, or the Other is the signifier that does not justify the function of light. 

"To exist depends on the Other" (p.90)

Day does not exist by itself and it needs the Other to be, to exist. Hence, Day always lacks itself. But Day also knows that the Other (Night) does not exist by itself. Both Day and Night repeat their subjects, their significance through each other. They represent what exists and what inexists as these two form an infinite queue, repeating itself forever. Why? Because the One is impossible; the Real is impossible. Neither Day nor Night is enough to tell the truth about the One. 

 "the true only ever occurs in missing its mate" (p.155)

Day is haunting Night. Day desires Night because Day seeks to meet, to touch what it lacks, the things that are represented in Night. This desire is the desire to return to the One, to fully represent the One. But this is impossible. The One, the Real, the impossible makes Day desires Night forever. The One is similar in itself to an empty hole, to what inexists (because it is impossible, and what inexists is closer to the impossible). A signifier or a subject, such as Day, seeks to fill this empty hole by the whole representation of the One. Day and Night, however, cannot exist at the same time and at the same place. They try to meet, to make a relation to fill this emptiness. But what Day and Night, each one alone, gets is their emptiness. When Day desires Night and seeks to unify with it, but it cannot, then it knows that it lacks itself as much as the Other (Night) lacks itself, so it meets only the reality of emptiness, of the impossible. That is why Lacan says:

Concept qua concept is an emptiness (p.45)

Day and Night can be represented according to Lacan in the following diagram:

Day and Night
Lacan Logic

The One, the Real, which is impossible, is represented in the up-right quarter: There is no Day that has no light; or according to the symbols I use, there is no shape that is not empty. This quarter is the quarter of no shape - no empty. It is impossible to put anything inside this quarter. It is impossible for a Subject/Signifier to meet these conditions: no shape that is not empty. Out of this impossibility, a possible subject should exist: the up-left quarter, where some shapes are not empty (or there is at least one shape that is not empty). Now, we can imagine that, in this quarter, since there are some shapes that are not empty, then there are others that are empty (Days) because some does not mean all. This quarter is called the necessary. It is necessary for existence to exist. In the bottom-left quarter, we can imagine that all shapes are possibly empty. It is called the possible quarter. There is a contradiction between the possible quarter and the necessary quarter. This contradiction is another "sign" of the impossibility, the essential lacking of whatsoever Subject might be. Finally, the bottom-right quarter is the famous formula of Lacan, Not-all. It means that not-all shapes are empty; some shapes can be full, and others can be something else (represented by triangles and filled rectangles). Not-all means that the function of light or of being empty shapes is not enough to essentialize the subject or the Other (of that subject). It again refers to the impossible that cannot be grasped by a universal quantifier (All); The One cannot be grasped by the universal All Days have light. 

This argument can be applied to any other objects/subjects: Death/Life or Man/Woman (which is what Lacan discusses). Woman does not exist is a famous "slogan" of Lacan, which means that the Subject of woman is the subject that lacks the function of the phallus: Not-all women are subject to the phallus and there is no woman that makes the phallus function wrong (so, the Woman is similar to Night in our example). Also, as I said that Night and Day cannot meet together, Lacan said that there is no such a thing as sexual relation. When we copulate - at the symbolic level - we meet our emptiness. 

Lacan logic
Bottom-left: All x (man) are possibly subject to the function phi (Phallus)
Up-left: There is at least one x (man) that does not justify the function phi
Bottom-right: Not-all x (women) are subject to the function phi
Up-right: There is no x (woman) that makes the function phi wrong (does not justify it)  

Note:

Lacan is so close to what is known as Object-oriented ontology (OOO) since he is not an idealist and does not believe that this world exists only in our minds and manifests only for the human intellect. Things exist as they beget each other and think of themselves. Anything is a signifier that throws its subject to another signifier. The subject can be a human being or any other "object" that can be signified. 

I read also the following articles to clarify this seminar: 

Zwart, Hub. 2022. Lacan's Dialectics of Knowledge Production: The Four Discourses as a Detour to Hegel. Foundations of Science. Online. 

Vanheule, Stijn. 2016. Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Frontiers in Psychology. Online.  

https://crisiscritique.org/april2019/hoens.pdf