[Lutecium-group] la suture de J.A Miller ver anglophone

[Frans Tassigny]

No-one without those precise conceptions of analysis which only a personal
analysis can provide has any right to concern himself (or herself) with it.
Ladies and Gentlemen, doubtless you fully con- form to the strength of that
ruling by Freud in the *New Introductory Lectures*.

Thus, articulated as a dilemma, a question raises itself foe me in your
regard.

If, contravening this injunction, it is of psychoanalysis that I am going to
speak, - then. by listening to someone whom you know to be incapable of
producing the credentials which alone would authorize your assent, what are
you doing here?

Or. if my subject is not psychoanalysis. - then you who so faith- fully
attend here in order to become conversant with the problems which relate to
the Freudian field, what are you doing here!

And you above all. Ladies and Gentlemen the analysts, what arc you doing
here. you to whom Freud specifically addressed the warning not to rely on
those who are not confirmed in the practice of your science, on those
so-called authorities, those literary intellectuals, who bring their soup to
warm at your fire, without so much as recognizing your hospitality? Even if
he who reigns in your kitchens as head-chef could amuse himself by letting
someone lower than the lowest kitchen boy get hold of the pot with which you
are so naturally concerned since it is from it that you draw your
sustenance, it was still uncertain - and I confess that I myself doubted -
that you would be ready to drink in a soup merely cooked up in that way. And
yet you are here. Permit me to marvel a moment at your presence, and at the
privilege of your having lent me for a while that most precious of the
organs at your disposal, your ear.

Which I must now attempt to justify to it, and with reasons which are at
least admissible.

I will not keep you waiting. The justification lies in this, which will come
as no surprise after the developments which have so enchanted your hearing
at this seminar since the start of the academic year, that the Freudian
field is not representable as a closed surface. The opening up of
psychoanalysis is not the effect of the liberalism, the whim. the blindness
even of he who has set himself as its guardian. For. if not being situated
on the inside does not relegate you to the outside, it is because at a
certain point, excluded from a two-dimensional topology, the two surfaces
join up and the periphery or outer edge crosses over the circumscription.

That I can recognize and occupy that point is what releases you from the
dilemma I presented to you. and entitles you to be listening to me to-day.
Which will enable you to grasp. Ladies and Gentlemen, to what extent you arc
implicated in my undertaking and how far its successful outcome concerns
you.

*Concept of the Logic of the Signifier*

What I am aiming to restore, piecing together indications dispersed '
through the work of Jacques Lacan, is to be designated the logic of the
signifier - it is a general logic in that its functioning is formal in
relation to all fields of knowledge including that of psychoanalysis which,
in acquiring a specificity there, it governs; it is a minimal logic in that
within it are given those pieces only which arc necessary to assure it a
progression reduced to a linear movement, uniformally generated at each
point of its necessary sequence. That this logic should be called the logic
of the signifier avoids the partiality of the conception which would limit
its validity to the field in which it was first produced as a category; to
correct its linguistic declension is to prepare the way for its importation
into other discourses, an importation which we will not fail to carry out
once we have grasped its essentials here.

The chief advantage to be gained from this process of minimisation is the
greatest economy of conceptual expenditure, which is then in danger of
obscuring to you that the conjunctions which it effects between certain
functions are so essential that to neglect them is to compromise analytic
reasoning proper.

By considering the relationship between this logic and that which I will
call logician's logic, we see that its particularity lies in the fact that
the first treats of the emergence of the second. and should be conceived of
as the logic of the origin of logic - which is to say, chat it docs not
follow its laws, but that, prescribing their jurisdiction, itself falls
outside that jurisdiction.

This dimension of the archeological can be grasped most succinctly through a
movement back from the field of logic itself, where its miscognition. at its
most radical because closest to is recognition is effected.

That this step repeats something of that which Derrida has shown to be
exemplary to phenomenology
[1]<http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html#_ftn1>will
conceal to none but the most hasty this crucial difference, that here
miscognition finds its point of departure in the production of meaning. We
can say that it is constituted not as a forgetting, but as a repression.

To designate it I choose the name of suture. Suture names the relation of
the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures
there as the clement which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in. For, while
there lacking, it is not purely and simply absent. Suture, by extension -
the general relation of lack to the structure - of which it is an element,
inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of.

It is the objective of this paper to articulate the concept of suture which,
if it is not named explicitly as such by Jacques Lacan. is constantly
present in his system.

Let it be absolutely clear that it is not as philosopher or philosopher's
apprentice that I am speaking here - if the philosopher is as characterized
by Heinrich Heine in a sentence quoted by Freud, "with his nightcaps and the
tatters of his dressing- gown. patching up the gaps in the structure of the
universe". But take care not to think that the function of suturation is
peculiar to the philosopher: what is specific to the philosopher is the
determination of the field in which he operates as a "universal structure".
It is important that you realize that the logician, like the linguist. also
sutures at his particular level. And, quite as much. anyone who says "I".

In order to grasp suture we must cut across what a discourse makes explicit
of itself, and distinguish from its meaning, its letter. This paper is
concerned with a letter - a dead letter. It should come as no surprise if
the meaning then dies.

The main thread of this analysis will be Gottlob Frege's argument in
*Grundlagen
der Arithmetik*,
[2]<http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html#_ftn2>crucial
here because it puts into question those terms which in Peano's
axiomatic, adequate for a construction of a theory of natural numbers, are
taken as primary - that is. the zero, the number, the successor.
[3]<http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html#_ftn3>This
calling into question of the theory, by disintricating, from the
axiomatic where the theory is consolidated, the suturing, delivers up this
last.

*The Zero and the One*

- Here then is the question posed in its most general form;

what is it that functions in the series of whole natural
numbers to which we can assign their progression?

And the answer, which I shall give at once before establishing it:

in the process of the constitution of the series,
in the genesis of progression,
the function of the subjet, miscognized is operative.

This proposition will certainly appear as a paradox to anyone who knows that
the logical discourse of Frege opens with the exclusion of that which is
held by empiricist theory to be essential for the passage of the thing to
the unit, and of the set of units to the unit of number: that is, the
function of the subject, as support of the operations of abstraction and
unification.

For the unity which is thus assured both for the individual and the set, it
only holds in so far as the number functions as its name. Whence originates
the ideology which makes of the subject the producer of fictions, short of
recognizing it as the product of its product - an ideology in which logical
and psychological discourse are wedded, with political discourse occupying
the key position, which can be seen admitted in Occam, concealed in Locke,
and miscognized thereafter.

A subject therefore, defined by attributes whose other side is political,
disposing as of powers, of a faculty of memory necessary to close the set
without the loss of any of the interchangeable elements, and a faculty of
repetition which operates inductively. There is no doubt that it is this
subject which Frege, setting himself from the start against the empiricist
foundation of arithmetic. excludes from the field in which the concept of
the number is to appear.

But if it is held that the subject is not reducible, in its most essential
function, to the psychological, then its exclusion from the field of number
is assimilable to repetition. Which is what I have to demonstrate.

You will be aware that Frege's discourse starts from the fundamental system
comprising the three concepts of the concept, the object and the number, and
two relations, that of the concept to the object, which is called
subsumption and that of the concept to the number which I will call
assignation. A number is assigned to a concept which subsumes objects.

What is specifically logical about this system is that each concept is only
defined and exists solely through the relation which it maintains as
subsumer with that which it subsumes. Similarly, an object only has
existence in so far as it falls under a concept. there being no other
determination involved in its logical existence, so that the object takes
its meaning from its difference to the thing integrated, by its
spatio-temporal localization, to the real.

Whence you can see the disappearance of the thing which must be effected in
order for it to appear as object - which is the thing in so far as it is
one,

It is dear that the concept which operates in the system. formed solely
through the determination of subsumption, is a redoubled concept: the
concept of identity to a concept.

This redoubling. induced in the concept by identity, engenders the logical
dimension, because in effecting the disappearance of the thing it gives rise
to the emergence of the numerable.

For example, if 1 group what falls under the concept "child of Agamemnon and
Cassandra", I summon in order to subsume them Pelops and Teledamus. To this
set I can only assign a number if I put into play the concept 'identical to
the concept: child of Agamemnon and Cassandra'. Through the effect of the
fiction of (his concept, the children now intervene in so far as each one
is. so to speak, applied to itself - which transforms it into a unit, and
gives to it the status of an object which is numerable as such. It is this
one of the singular unit. this one of identity of the subsumed, which is
common to all numbers in so far as they are first constituted as units.