Mladen Dolar
One divides into two, two
doesn’t merge into one. This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite
its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger
of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite
this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard
it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author—it’s almost like
speaking Chinese. The slogan combines an ontological statement, a mathematical
theorem, and a political battle-cry. So why does one split into two in
mathematics, ontology, and politics? And why, once we arrive at two, can we
never get back to the supposed unity of one?
I will try to speak about
something very minimal and basic, something extremely simple and at the same
time very enigmatic: namely, how to get from one to two. This movement suggests
ways to conceive difference and, more precisely, how to conceive the difference
between two kinds of difference. The first kind of difference can be seen as the
difference of numerical count. What accounts for counting, for getting from one
to two? What pushes the count in its forward thrust? For if we have
successfully managed this heroic feat of addition, assuming that one plus one
makes two, then there seems to be no stopping this process, we can reproduce
this step again and again, and thus count to infinity. To be sure, what seems
to be a simple operation, the most elementary of all, the one acquired with the
first lesson in mathematics, is itself full of pitfalls and hidden traps, and
we only need to mention Frege, set theory, the suture, or Badiou’s intricate
theory of numbers to remind ourselves of the complexity of the operations
involved. But I will not follow this path.1 I will
simply point out that in this way one hasn’t really arrived at two, first
because the two that has been thereby produced is still hostage to one, is its
extrapolation and extension, its replication, one splitting itself and
reproducing itself; and second, one hasn’t arrived at two but at more than two,
the two of many, the whole host of numbers, since the process that one has
instigated cannot stop at two, it is endowed with the forward thrust to multiply
itself, so that “two” is merely a provisional stopover, a halt from which we
must hurry on.
The other side of this
question of the two is precisely the side of the other, the Other, its capital
letter signifying the “big Other,” underscoring the implication of drama. The
question of the Other brings forth not merely the numerical two, the second
following the first, but the question of something of a different order,
something that is not a mere extension of the first, but rather something that
would really present two, count for two, the two heterogeneous to the one and
recalcitrant to the progression of ones into infinity. However much we count,
however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the
Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous
and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be
precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity. In a nutshell, the otherness
of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted
for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping
from the circle, or the ban, of One. The dimension of the Other might present a
two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one
and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based
on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether,
beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.”
One can immediately appreciate
the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not
all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another,
whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has
thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a
dimension that would be able to break the spell of One, in particular its
complicity with totality, with forming a whole. There is a hidden propensity of
One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a
single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy,
spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one
and all—to conceive the all as one, to encompass the whole in its unity, and to
take the one as the simple clue to the whole and whatever multiplicity it may
present; to take the whole under the auspices of One. “One and all” served as
the blueprint for philosophy, holding in check its whole history; it spelled
out philosophy’s mission, its grand overarching chart, its task and its
calling, in whatever particulars one conceived it.
So if the Other exists, if it
can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to
get out of this ban and this circle. Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if
I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language,
was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of
hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the
Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One. And if I content myself
to mention just three great names, I will invoke Nietzsche with a single line
from the end of Beyond Good and Evil: “Am Mittag wars da wurde eins zu zwei”
[It was at noon that one turned into two]—the noon as the time of the shortest
shadow and the minimal difference, the time of the suspension of time, the
division of time—and the title of Alenka Zupančič’s book The Shortest Shadow:
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. I will invoke Marx and the two of
antagonism—Mao’s slogan was designed to spell out its political and ontological
impact in a simple adage, transposing it into terms of counting. I will invoke
Freud—and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the
Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term.2
The French autre, for the
other, stems from the Latin alter, which basically means the other one of two
and two only (as opposed to alius or secundus, the second of many). Many
languages have retained a distinct word for the second of many as opposed to
the second of merely two, not to be followed by a third and so forth. This
etymological lead already puts us on the track of the problem of the two, it
already gives us an inkling that the two poses a different problem than the
second of many and that there is something there that defies counting. This
other would be something that contravenes against oneness, while the second
merely extrapolates what has already been encapsulated in the one and presents
its prolongation.
I said above “If the Other
exists…” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of
psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a
spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory, an antinomy
worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a
pinnacle—where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two,
an opposition that cannot be reduced. This Lacanian antinomy of the two
pertains to the nature of the Other. One can pose it as the antinomy of two
massively opposing statements: first, There is the Other, which is the
essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud
spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another
stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its
count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness,
which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary
prospect. So there is the Other of the unconscious. Lacan, who had, in addition
to his extremely difficult style, a talent for simple and striking formulas,
proposed the slogan “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” There is
an Other that speaks through the unconscious and defies the count of
consciousness. And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the
Other”—there is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from
assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain
terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other. There is
the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains
to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their
intimacy. There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis
has to deal with, and this may be seen as a shorthand to pinpoint their
specificity, to assemble them with a single stroke under one heading, the
heading of the Other, the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation
to the realm of One. They present the rupture of unity, they defy being counted
for one.
Yet this is but the first part
of the antinomy, the part positing the Other at the core, the alterity that
determines intimacy as extimate, in Lacan’s excellent neologism. The second
part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The
Other lacks.3
There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a
bit further: The Other doesn’t exist. “There is the Other” vs. “The Other
doesn’t exist.”
How can the very dimension on
which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist? What is the status of
this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the
unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time
emphatically lacks? Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring
contradiction? Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of
knowledge and unitary reasoning? And how can one posit the Other as the very
notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining
that it lacks? Is this an exhaustive alternative?
What, if anything, is the
Other? What is the Other the name for?4 The
first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the
Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the
very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition,
that which enables it to signify.
And if this claim is to be
placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the
name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure. The Other is the Other
of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and
Lévi-Straussian underpinnings. What follows from there, in the same general
thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language
(another way of saying “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other”). But
what kind of Other is announcing itself such that the unconscious is structured
like it? What Other is the unconscious the discourse of? It is clear that
Freud’s first three books, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, all single out
the unconscious as a series of “marginal” phenomena that pertain to language
but only as its slips, cracks, short-circuits, breaches, temporary
out-of-jointness, not as belonging to its normal, standard, universal use. They
pertain to homonymy5—as
opposed to synonymy, which tries to preserve the unity of meaning—verbal
contaminations, puns, and mix-ups, which all condition what Freud described as
the process of the work of the unconscious, ultimately to be put under the two
broad headings of condensation and displacement. They are condensed and
displaced in relation to the signifying One of language.
There are two perspectives on
this structure. The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system
in which all entities are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No
element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its
difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and
hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of
tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of
differences—and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with
equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing—the whole of
culture. (There is a univocity of difference that can be predicated in the same
way of any positive entity—this was structuralism’s bottom line.) But the
second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents
the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system. The words
contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics,
they contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes
the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes. The first perspective hinges
on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics
possible. The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks
and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and
unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue. It
pertains also to what Alfred Jarry, the immortal Jarry of Le roi Ubu, called
pataphysics, the science opposed to metaphysics that deals with the exception,
the contingent, the non-universal.
So if we have on one hand the
Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a
bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug. With
the unconscious the structure slips. What was supposed to work as the Other,
the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other
face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is
the Other with the bug.6 And what
is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other—the Other is
the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps
derailing it. The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency,
that which defies regularity and law. Inside the Other of language, which
enables speech, there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us
say something else than we intended, derailing the intention of meaning. Yet
the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as
another Other, the Other within the Other—the Other cannot be duplicated and
counted, the bug makes it uncountable.7 The
alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it
opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to
speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference
within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the
symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its
own. And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the
impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one. In other
words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,” on the relation
to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated.
So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap
between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents
the figure of two that are not merged into one. The problem that remains is
that, well, the Other doesn’t exist.
Yet the figure of the Other as
the Other of language, structure, code, and the symbolic order is but one face
of the Other. There is another face, which pertains to the other strand of
discovery in psychoanalysis, to sexuality and sexual difference. In Lacan, for
example, we can read the following: “The Other, in my parlance, cannot be
anything else but the Other sex” [L’Autre, dans mon langage, cela ne peut donc
être que l’Autre sexe].8 “The
Other, if it may be one, must certainly have a relation to what appears as the
other sex.”9
So it appears now that the other face of the Other may well be the face of the
woman, and that the Other is inherently and at the same time the Other of sex,
of sex as the Other, sex under the auspices of the irreducible two. But, and
this is essential, not the two of count.
If in the first instance the
Other seemed a disembodied entity that had to do with signifiers and
structures, then in this other aspect it is the Other that most intimately
sticks to the body and represents its rift. Not a structural difference, but
the rift of our natural bodily being. This implies that the sexual difference,
if this be the name of this rift, is not a difference that could be encompassed
or covered or accounted for in terms of the signifying difference, the
difference of Saussurean differentiality, that is, in terms of One and its
split or its replication. It doesn’t present the two of counting, based on
counting one and then extending this count, it pertains to the “other”
difference that cannot be counted and stops at two, that is, at the difference of
the one and the Other. But according to the other part of our Lacanian
antinomy, the Other lacks, it doesn’t exist, it has no ontological consistency
on its own, it marks the persistence of a difference that eludes the series of
signifying differences and cannot be captured by them. Consequently, it would
follow that the Other, as “the Other sex,” doesn’t exist either, and this is
indeed the consequence drawn by Lacan’s notorious dictum, which caused so much
havoc, that “The Woman doesn’t exist.” If the Other is the Other sex, the
conclusion inevitably follows—but the trouble is that non-existence doesn’t
make the Other vanish, it doesn’t amount to zero. Something is proclaimed not
to exist—the Other, the Woman—but that doesn’t mean it has disappeared. Of this
non-existence something stubbornly persists.
There is an enigma at the very
discovery of psychoanalysis, which developed in two separate ways. In his first
three books, Freud presents the unconscious as the new object of the new
science, something that Lacan summed up, half a century later, in the notorious
formula The unconscious is structured like a language, that is, like a
derailment of language, its constant slippage. Then in 1905, Freud published
the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a surprising work with respect to
the earlier books. Its focus is not on language and its vicissitudes—there is
an astounding absence of linguistic considerations—but rather on the body and
its vicissitudes, deviations from its natural habitus, needs, and maturation.
This is not a physiological body of firm substance and natural causality, but a
body haunted by a cut, and this cut into physiological causality conditions and
produces the drives, the new entities. Sexuality, such as Freud describes it,
is placed in this cut in the body, causing the bodily needs to deviate from
their natural goal and tend toward other aims. To put it in terms of counting,
bodies can be counted, but the cut makes for uncountable entities, what Freud
appropriately called partial objects, that is, objects “less than one,” not to
be counted as one, objects partial by their very nature, not by virtue of a
curtailment of a unity. But this partial nature is precisely what makes for the
two, the two heterogeneous to the numerical one. If the first way concerns “the
mind” and its derailments, the second concerns “the body” and its derailments.
How do the two fit together? Well, they are connected precisely by the Other.
From here one could propose Lacan’s major thesis on “What, if anything, is the
Other?” “Of what is the Other the name?” It is the Other of the symbolic, but
naming the locus where the symbolic slips—the Other is the Other of the bug,
not of order—and this is the place where the unconscious sneaks in and where
the subject of desire takes its slippery hold. And the Other is the Other of
sex, the body, enjoyment, surplus enjoyment, the drives, partial objects, the
heterogeneous excess that is the bug of sexuality and can never be assigned its
place. Those are the two directions of the initial discovery of psychoanalysis,
and the notion of the Other brings them together under the same roof. It names
together, under one heading, in the same framework, in language and the body,
that which presents alterity, that which emerges precisely at the interface of
bodies and languages, at the interface of these countable entities, at their
infringement. One could say that there is a univocity of the Other that can be
predicated of both in the same way.
In many languages, sex is
etymologically the cut. But is it the cut in half (as in Plato’s legendary
theory)? Is it the cut into two? How many sexes are there? If sex is section,
rather than vivisection, does it cut into two only? There is a widespread
strand of criticism that aims at binary oppositions as the locus of enforced
sexuality, its regimentation, its imposed mold, its compulsory stricture, or
“the compulsory heterosexuality.” By the imposition of the binary code of two
sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint of placing ourselves on
one side or the other, thus discarding the multiplicity of sexual positions.
But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: sexual difference poses the
problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary
opposition nor accounted for in terms of the numerical two. It is irreducible
to the signifying difference which defines the elements of the structure. It
cannot be adequately described in terms of opposing features or as a relation
of given entities existing prior to difference. It presents the figure of the
two precisely by being irreducible neither to the one of count replicating or
splitting itself, nor to the two that would form a complementary whole.
The two that we are after is
not the binary two of equal or different ones, extensions of the same order,
but the two of the one and the Other. The sexual difference establishes the two
precisely because it can neither be numerically counted two nor squeezed into a
binary opposition. And if there is an astounding variety of sexual positions,
it’s because of the impossibility of coming to terms with this count, its
irreducible two-ness.
To be sure, language
constantly attempts to capture the sexual difference by means of the signifier,
and perhaps this defines a very basic linguistic gesture. The most general
classification of nouns, in most languages, follows precisely the sexual
pattern in order to establish the roughest of divides, that into masculine and
feminine gender. This opposition, supposedly taken from nature, is used as the
most elementary guideline to sort out the vocabulary. But the spectacular
metonymic proliferation in all directions testifies to the impossibility of the
task—when anything can be grammatically sexed, nothing can be, and the very
instrument of such classification is ruined by its own success. In Truffaut’s Jules
et Jim there is a famous line where Oskar Werner, as a German, tells Jeanne
Moreau (the French woman par excellence): “What a strange language is French where
l’amour is masculine and la guerre is feminine.” In German, with die Liebe and der
Krieg, it’s the opposite, supposedly how it should be if we are to follow “a
natural pattern.” In Germany, love is the domain of women and war is the domain
of men, while in France, reputed for perversion, it seems to be the other way
around. “Make love not war” would have a completely different meaning and
impact in Germany than in France. So taking the sexual difference as the
pattern of grammatical gender makes for infinite possibilities of extension in
any direction, while the guiding principle becomes completely useless.
Everything can be accounted for and squeezed into the gender mold except for
the sexual difference itself, which served as the model. The difference on
which everything may be modeled persists as a real which cannot itself be
seized as a difference.
One can briefly hint at the
question of the phallus in this context. In the traditional view and as the
pragmatic “rule of thumb,” the phallus has served as the simple discriminatory
factor supposed to distinguish two sexes. Either one has it or one doesn’t,
which should suffice. This is where a simple anatomical contingency meets the
basic trait of the signifying logic, the difference between marque and manque,
the mark and its absence. The presence or absence of a privileged anatomical
marker follows the same logic that fuels the differential structure, it
coincides with its elementary matrix. The “phallic signifier” can thus serve as
a model of the signifying difference, based on the presence or absence of
differential traits.
The privilege of the phallus
could therefore be seen to follow from the overlapping of two spheres, the
signifier and the body, which coincide at this privileged site. The phallic difference
would thus present the very model of the first difference, the oppositive and
binary difference, the Saussurean difference, from which it would seem that in
this relation to the sexed body it obtains its hidden reference point, standing
at the core of the production of signification (hence the title of one of
Lacan’s notorious écrits, “The Signification of the Phallus”).10 But
here is one of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis: the sexual difference cannot
be accounted for in terms of phallic difference. It eludes this phallic logic.
It stands in difference to this logic as such, as another difference
irreducible to presence or absence of differential traits, irreducible to the
phallus as signifier. This is why the sexual difference cannot be written—it is
what doesn’t cease not to be written.11
If there is a real of sexual
difference, a real that makes its two irreducible to the two of count or the
expansion of One, then it can be most simply and economically epitomized by
Lacan’s dictum “There is no sexual relation” [Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel].
There is a two, but there is no relation. There is no relation between the One
and the Other, they don’t complement each other. The supposition that there is
a complementarity of two principles, that there is a relation, this supposition
has largely underpinned traditional ontological assumptions. Perhaps the best
known figure of the relation between the two is the Taoist yin-yang symbol. It
is an image that has massively served as support for an entire cosmology,
ontology, social theory, astronomy. It gives figure precisely to the two (and
only two) poles of masculine and feminine, and the image is formed in such a
way that they complement and complete each other, in perfect symmetry. There is
a circle, and the circle itself is divided by two half-circle lines. The
masculine and the feminine principle, their conflictual complementarity, are
taken as the clue that informs every entity, indeed the entire universe. What
does this image convey? There is a strong thesis presented in it that one could
spell out like this: there is a relation. There is a sexual relation. Every
relation is sexual. The relation exists emphatically, conspicuously, in a
demonstrative manner, in the complementarity of the masculine and the feminine,
in their perfect balance, the perfect match, and can serve as a paradigm for
everything else. Everything can be interpreted in light of this image. The
thesis implies and manifests even more: there is sense, this is the visual
embodiment of sense that can endow everything else with sense. Sense basically
consists in relation—if there is relation, there is sense, and only relation
“makes sense.” The paradigm that regulates sense also regulates the sexual
relation.12
It has the power to bestow sense, which emerges from the complementarity of the
two. So this sign states: one divides into two, and the two merge into one. The
exact opposite of the other notorious Chinese dictum, the one we started with:
one divides into two, but two doesn’t merge into one. For Lacan, Aristotelian
ontology is like our Western version of yin-yang, it makes analogous
assumptions about hyle and morphe, matter and form, the feminine and the
masculine, the passive and the active. And this goes for the bulk of
traditional dichotomies: matter and form, body and spirit, nature and culture,
intuition and intellect, active and passive—all of them are secretly
sexualized, premised on an assumption about the relation. There is a theme to
ponder: ontology and sexuality. To what extent were ontological assumptions
always underpinned by sexual assumptions, assumptions about the sexual
relation, its existence as a guiding principle, the hidden assumption about the
relation?13
So the thesis that there is no
sexual relation contains a strong ontological implication: there is an
irreducible two but no relation, not even, especially not, the relation of
count; there is also not complementarity. There is the Other (of the
unconscious, of sex), but it cannot be counted for one, and it cannot
complement its other (consciousness, “opposite sex”) in a division of labor. It
lacks, it doesn’t exist, but nevertheless, and this is the whole problem, its
non-existence doesn’t run out into a simple nothing. But what remains of this
non-existence? Can one name it?
In the first pages of his last
big book, Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou proposes the term “democratic
materialism” to name the prevailing spontaneous set of assumptions that form
the contemporary doxa.
This democratic materialism
can be summarized, according to Badiou, in one “ontological” statement: “There
are only bodies and languages” [Il n’y que des corps et des langages].14 There
is the firm being of bodies, their proliferation, their striving for pleasures
and enjoyment, the increase, growth, and expansion of life; and there is the
multiplicity of languages, the democracy of their plurality and proliferation,
multiculturalism, minoritarian practices, all of them entitled to recognition.
Democratic materialism is the spontaneous idealism of our times—nobody believes
any longer in the salvation of the immortal soul, we firmly believe in bodies
and languages.
Badiou’s addition to this
axiom is simple: “There are only bodies and languages, but apart from that
there are truths” [… sinon qu’il y a des verities].15 There
are truths that are of another order than bodies and languages, they engage
subjectivity and raise a claim to universality, but they don’t exist on some
separate location somewhere else—for our particular purpose we could say that
they emerge precisely with that excess at the interface of bodies and
languages, something that psychoanalysis brings together under the names of the
unconscious and sexuality, at the intersection that prevents the neutral
coexistence of bodies and languages, in a subtraction from the regime of bodies
and languages, epitomized by the Other. Bodies and signs can be counted, but
the Other makes for a two that is uncountable. The axiom of democratic
materialism has a corollary: there are only bodies and languages, but there is
no Other. The promotion of their expansion and proliferation precludes the
Other.
And this is where our adage
that the Other lacks takes precisely the opposite direction: it doesn’t mean
that, since it lacks, we are only stuck with bodies and languages, happily or
unhappily stuck, it means that the very existence of bodies and languages has
to be put into question. It is the two of the Other that undermines their
multiplicity and proliferation. The two that is neither one nor multiple, and
provides a precarious hold for truth.
I can, in conclusion, propose
a very simple name for it, a name stemming from the pre-Socratic times of the
dawn of philosophy. And the question of One and its division into two is indeed
a pre-Socratic question to start with. The first appearance of materialism in
the history of philosophy was linked with the atomists, and most notably with
the figure of Democritus. What is atomism, if not precisely a radical attempt
to submit bodies, the whole matter, indeed the cosmos, to count? Matter can be
counted, and the atoms are the indivisible particles that enable counting. The
atom would thus be the pure minimal element of matter that cannot be reduced
any further, and this is what enables them to be counted for one. If there is
division in them, and division there is, then it pertains not to the
indivisible hard particles, but to the void that surrounds them and allows them
to be counted for one at all. So we arrive at a split entity, an entity split
into itself and the void. Hegel was always enthusiastic about what he saw as
the speculative insight of ancient atomism, namely, that at base we always have
not a unity, but a unity split into something and a void, so that we have to
include the void as “the other half,” “the missing half” of firm being.16 That
which is most palpably material, reduced to its minimal, seems to behave like a
signifying structure, based on the minimal division presence/absence—one didn’t
have to wait for Saussure. This would spell out the secret of counting at the
dawn of philosophy. Yet this is not all. In the famous fragment 156 (in the Diels-Kranz
edition), Democritus inadvertently or intentionally introduced something else,
something that wouldn’t fall into the division between one and the void. He
coined a word that gave the classical philologists a headache because it is an
improper word formation in Greek. The word is den. Den is like the negation of hen
(hen of hen kai pan), of one, but not the usual negation, which would be ouden
or meden (not one, not even one)—it’s a negation that doesn’t quite negate.
What, if anything, is den? What is den the name of? I will give translations of
this fragment in three languages so you can appreciate the paradox.
First in German, by Hermann
Diels and Walther Kranz: “Das Ichts existiert ebenso sehr als das Nichts.”17
Barbara Cassin, a formidable French scholar, proposed the French translation ien—not
rien, nothing, but ien, “not nothing.”18 (Or,
alternatively, iun, not one.) W. I. Matson proposes the English translation
“hing,” as opposed to the thing: “Hing is no more real than nothing” or “Hing
exists no more than nothing.”19
Hing—less than a thing, but not nothing. So what is this entity, den? Not
something, not nothing, not being, not one, not positively existing, not
absent, not countable—and thus providing the minimal figure of the two.
Lacan singles it out:
When Democritus tried to
designate it … he says, It is not the meden [non-being] that is essential … but
a den, which, in Greek, is a coined word. He did not say hen [one], let alone on
[being]. What, then, did he say? He said, answering the question I asked today,
that of idealism, Nothing, perhaps?—not perhaps nothing, but not nothing.”20
This is perhaps the closest
that philosophy, at its dawn, would ever come to what Lacan, at the other end,
would name objet a, the object a, which he saw as his crucial contribution to
psychoanalysis, his key theoretical invention.
There is a history of
materialism to be written that would take den as its guideline—not simply
matter or the atom, for atoms ultimately run into the first kind of difference,
that of count. Let me remind you that the young Karl Marx wrote his doctoral
dissertation in philosophy in 1841 on the subject of “The difference between
the philosophy of nature of Democritus and Epicurus,” where he took this up.
Again, Lacan singled it out: “[Democritus] was no more materialist than anyone
who has some sense, for instance me or Marx.”21 And
let me quickly give another reference from a completely different quarter,
Samuel Beckett. When Beckett was pressed about the philosophical implications
of his work, he wrote in a letter from 1967, “If I were in the unenviable
position of having to study my work, my point of departure would be the ‘Naught
is more real…’”22 So
Beckett himself proposed Democritus’s fragment 156 as a clue (one of two) to
his entire work. He used it verbatim at various points in his work, and in his
later work he invented a fine name for it: the unnullable least.
So where does this leave us
with regard to our initial problem, the way in which the one divides into two?
Which two does one divide into? My answer would be that it is not the two of
count, which is the replication of one, the division of one producing more
ones, nor is it the two of complementary halves that one would try to combine
and fit into a whole. Ultimately, the two, the two of the Other, the Other that
doesn’t exist but nevertheless insists, the two would be the division into one
and den—not something, not nothing, not one, not being. Enough to stake our
hopes on? The object of our perseverance.
1 Jacques-Alain Miller, “La
suture,” Cahiers pour l’analyse 1 (1966): 37–49; Alain Badiou, Le
nombre et les nombres (Paris: Seuil, 1990).
2 One
could cite as a further token another programmatic statement, the René Char
quotation that Foucault emphatically placed on the back cover of his last two
books on the history of sexuality: “The history of men is a long succession of
synonyms of a same word [vocable]. To contradict this is a duty [Y contredire
est un devoir].” To contradict the synonymy of One—but with what?
3 One
can find it, for example, in this minimal and straight form in one of Lacan’s
last public statements: “L’Autre manque. Ça me fait drôle à moi aussi. Je
tiens le coup pourtant, ce qui vous épate, mais je ne le fais pas pour
cela” [The Other lacks. I don’t feel happy about it myself. Yet, I endure,
which fascinates you, but I am not doing it for that reason].
4 But
asking “What?” already precludes another way of asking, namely, “Who
is the other?” For the question of the other, and this is just a digression, is
first dramatically posed in relation to another person, this alter ego
next to me, the same as me and for that very reason all the more the Other.
This is where the whole drama of what Lacan famously called the mirror stage
comes in, the mirror stage “as formative of the function of the ego,” as the
title of his first paper runs. In this drama, the alter ego is
constitutive of the ego, precisely insofar as it is the agent of alterity,
opacity, the foreignness of the Other, under the auspices of “the same,” and it
is only by this other and through it that one can assume the self of the ego as
“my own,” The foreignness of the other intersects with the own-ness of the
self; the other is on the one hand homogenized, so that I can recognize myself in
it, but only at the price of alienating myself in this image of the other—the
other is the same as me, my double, and precisely because of that my
competitor, my opponent, an intimate enemy who threatens my life and integrity.
And one can, in another quick aside, point to the fact that Levinas took his
cue from this same constellation, from the question of “Who is the other?” from
the alterity of the other, epitomized strikingly and immediately by his or her
face, in a way that cannot be circumvented and that circumscribes the very
notion of the self—so his whole enterprise hinges massively on the question of
the two and how to conceive it, and on the ethics that follows, taking the
Other as its guideline. This is his particular way of taking up the question of
the two. But I will not pursue this further.
5 If
the Char quotation used by Foucault placed the history of men under the banner
of a long succession of synonyms, then in this first simple view one could
maintain that what contradicts synonymy can be seen as the realm of homonymy.
Against the unity of meaning that can be expressed by different means while
remaining the same, there is the disruption of erratic similarity of sounds
that don’t heed meaning—a dispersion of meaning along the lines of contingent
similarities. The unconscious, at its minimal, contradicts synonymy by
homonymy. Could one say: The one of synonymy vs. the two of homonymy?
6 The
bug means 1. cimex lectularius, a nasty little creature, a small insect; 2.
a defect, a deficiency, a malfunction; 3. a fixed idea, a folly (for example,
one can be bitten by a “love-bug” or a “money-bug,” following the dictionary);
4. an imaginary object of terror; 5. a recording or eavesdropping device of
tiny size; 6. bugger? The six meanings present a very good introduction into
the theory of the object a. There are also “bug-eyed monsters.”
7 This
is the point of another Lacanian dictum: There is no Other of the Other.
Lacan first maintained that the Name of the Father was the Other of the Other,
the guarantee of the symbolic, and only gradually came to demote it, to
pluralize—Names of the Father—and eventually to turn it into the symptom of the
symbolic rather than its guarantee. See the work of Lorenzo Chiesa.
8
Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil 1975), 40.
9
Ibid., 65.
10
Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006),
575–584.
11
Jacques Lacan, Encore, 87. Opposed to this, the phallus is something that
ceased not to be written with the advent of psychoanalysis. “Phallus … —the
analytic experience ceases its not being written. This to cease not being written
implies the point of what I have called contingency. … Phallus which was in
ancient times reserved for Mystery, has through psychoanalysis ceased not to be
written precisely as a contingency. Not any more” (86–7). What was veiled as a
Mystery turned out to be the banal overlapping of the signifier and the bodily
contingency. Cf. Zupančič, The Odd One In (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2008), 205.
12
Lacan comments on yin-yang in The Four Fundamental Concepts
(Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 151. “… primitive science is a sort of
sexual technique.”
13
Jacques Lacan, Encore, 76. “Let’s look at how these notions of active and
passive have dominated everything that has been conceived of the relation
between form and matter, this fundamental relation on which Plato’s and then
Aristotle’s every step is based. It is visible, palpable, that these statements
take their support only in a fantasy, by the means of which they have tried to
complete/complement that which cannot be said, namely the sexual relationship.”
14
Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 9.
15
Ibid., 12.
16
“The atomistic principle, with these first thinkers, didn’t remain in
exteriority, but apart from its abstraction contained a speculative
determination, that the void was recognized as the source of movement. This
implies a completely different relation between atoms and the void than the
mere one-beside-the-other [Nebeneinander] and mutual indifference of the two. …
The view that the cause of movement lies in the void contains that deeper
thought that the cause of becoming pertains to the negative.” G. W. F.
Hegel, Logic, TWA 5, 185–6.
17 Die
Fragmente der Vorsokratiker II, ed. Hermann Diels and Walther
Kranz (Berlin: Wiedmannsche Buchhandlung, 1935), 174.
18
Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin, Il n’y pas de rapport sexuel (Paris:
Fayard, 2010), 60–94.
19 W.
I. Matson, “Democritus, Fragment 156,” The Classical Quarterly 13 (1963):
26–29.
20
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 63–4.
21
Jacques Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” in Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 494.
22
Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (New York: Gove Press, 1984), 113. He used it
already in his early novel Murphy (1938) (“… naught than which, in the
guffaw of old Abderite, nothing is more real”), and then again in Malone
Dies (1951).
Mladen Dolar taught for 20
years in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia,
where he now works as a Senior Research Fellow. He is a member of the editorial
boards of the magazine Problemi and of the book collection Analecta. He is also
one of the founders of the Society of Theoretical Psychoanalysis and of the
Society for Cultural Studies. His scientific research work centres on: German
classical philosophy, structuralism, theoretical psychoanalysis, philosophy of
music. He is the author of a number of books, sucha as A Voice and Nothing More
(2006) most recently (with Slavoj Zizek) Opera’s Second Death.
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