As there’s going to be a break lasting till early spring, we need to draw some conclusions now about the protocol we’ve been dealing with, which is based on a single question: How does the anti-philosopher Lacan identify philosophy? I showed that the answer to this question involved three mediations: philosophy’s relationship to mathematics, its relationship to politics, and its relationship to love.
As far as mathematics is concerned, the results were split, as I showed with the examples of Plato, Descartes, and Hegel. I concluded that while recollection, method, and dialectical sublation, in Plato, Descartes, and Hegel respectively, illustrate Lacan’s thesis of a shift from the relationship between the saying and the said in a matheme to the consciousness/reality dyad in the realm of meaning, it is nevertheless the case that the axiomatic method, hyperbolic doubt, and the inaugural advent of a thinking of infinity—or, more precisely, the hypothetical nature of the axiomatic method, the hyperbolic nature of doubt, and the irreducibly creative inaugural advent—represent identifications of mathematics as the pure authority of the saying, even if each such identification is preliminary to a declaration of its inadequacy.
The position I’ll take with regard to Lacan, though at a remove from him, is that the great philosophical tradition is fundamentally divided in nature, precisely when it is under the condition of mathematics, because mathematics divides philosophy. A distinctive way in which philosophy is conditioned by mathematics is that it is ineluctably split between, on the one hand, an identification that subjects it to the test of meaning-lessness, and, on the other, a temptation of recollection of meaning, a suturing operation. This is in fact a variant of a general issue on which I’m strongly opposed to Heidegger: in my view, there is no historial unity to philosophy. Philosophy is a divided process. Its dividing line runs between the metaphysical temptation of the One and the dispositions that take their distance from it, that detach themselves from the One. In the test of mathematics, a test that philosophy has always had to undergo, there is a temptation of recollection of meaning, a hermeneutic temptation with regard to scientific intentionalities. But there is also an identification of mathematics that is resistant to interpretation and is even geared toward a thinking of truth as alien to meaning. Mathematics, in that case, teaches philosophers that all truth is meaning-less. A great philosophy always consists in the establishment of a divided process. This doesn’t mean that it’s not systematic; it is the system of the division itself. And it’s not a dialectical division, a division open to a synthetic use. It is philosophical thought itself that is the process or the establishment of this division. It’s just that mathematics is a particularly sensitive issue when it comes to establishing this division.
This can be put even more simply: philosophy is a procedure of separation from the religious, so you can always say the religious is in it, that’s always possible: what is separated from is presupposed in the act of separation. This is what the positivist, scientistic, anti-metaphysical, etc. critiques all say. Fine. “Religious” is being taken here in its broadest sense as the establishment of a space in which truth is absorbed back into the space of meaning. But philosophy is not just the—ultimately ever-present—religious, since it is the separation from this presence of the religious, and this is why it’s a living operation rather than a historically defined reiteration of the same gesture. Philosophy is that which, under conditions of constantly changing truths, always begins the separation from the religious anew. Ultimately, philosophy, even theological philosophy, has always asked what man would think and become if God weren’t there, if God were to die. We can grant Lacan that the religious is intrinsic, but it should be added that philosophy is one of the sites where the separation from the insistence of religion begins anew. And so you can say that religion insists in philosophy, but only provided that you add that philosophy is constitutively a certain regime of disruption of that insistence.
Next, I considered the question of the identification of philosophy, or metaphysics, as “plugging the hole of politics.” I said in what sense politics could be identified as a hole. I suggested in this regard a structure related to the RSI (real/symbolic/imaginary) schema. Here are its components: (1) Politics can be regarded as an imaginary hole in the real. (2) It can be regarded as a symbolic hole in the imaginary. (3) It can be regarded as a real hole in the symbolic. Philosophy would then plug this triple hole all at once.
The first point: politics as an imaginary hole in the real. When faced with the real test of the absolute fragmentation that capitalism produces, politics, as an imaginary glue, keeps the community or the group together. This is what Lacan calls its Church effect or its School effect, which he also calls its glue effect. I’m not going to go back over this point since we dealt with it at length last time.
So let’s begin with the second point this time: politics as the symbolic hole in the imaginary coherence of discourses. Politics is not, strictly speaking, a discourse; it’s an interdiscourse, a practice, and insofar as it is operative, i.e., that there is a certain being of politics, it is precisely only in the sense that its functioning never coincides with any discursive imaginary coherence whatsoever. When it exists, politics is a functioning that is not reducible to the discursively presentable imaginary coalescences. Marxism expressed this in its own language: the political theory of revolution, communist theory, makes a hole in the dominant ideology. Lacan would end up saying—and I think this is a maxim by which the hole is in fact exhibited as a symbolic hole, as a hole in which one operates in an excentered and autonomous way as opposed to the cohesion of the imaginary discursive position—Lacan, then, would end up saying: “I expect nothing from individuals, and something from a functioning” (T,133). That was his final statement about politics. Consequently, the “functioning” produces effects that can’t be recapitulated in the group’s discursive imaginary. As measured against these effects, individuals, leading personalities, are relegated to their own nothingness.
It’s an interesting thesis. Basically, for Lacan, politics, in its most general sense, is related to a symbolic authorization that functions on its own, without requiring any specific individuals to be connected to it in the position of necessary agents for the functioning to occur. And something can be expected from this functioning. What is it, this something? We have to come back to it ultimately: it’s knowledge. In the sense that it makes a symbolic hole in imaginary discursivity and the subjective positions it involves, politics, for Lacan, is the functioning of knowledge. It’s not knowledge per se but the possibility that some knowledge might function with a sort of indifference to the particularity of those using it. This also means that, in a sense, politics doesn’t touch truth, at least not directly. Politics is, at best, what can be expected, in terms of knowledge, from a functioning.
Finally, politics can be a real hole in the symbolic, or in the law, simply because it can be in a position to decide life or death. It can decide death. And when it does decide it, we know that it always makes a hole in the law. So politics might also be in the position of this real hole in the symbolic. This is what, with Carl Schmitt, will be reformulated as: the purpose of real politics is to establish a state of exception outside the law.
All of this is quite a clear structural description. Lacan will then say: this triple hole is transversally seized and concealed by philosophy, which, in this instance, he calls metaphysics. How does metaphysics plug these holes? It does so with a discourse that is assumed to have no holes. And this supposedly hole-less discourse of philosophy is the discourse of ideal politics, good politics, or politics finally grounded in its concept. Indeed, we know that the discourse of ideal, good, or grounded politics is philosophical in origin. Beyond any possible doubt. Suffice it to say that it is, apparently, what motivated Plato. Plato has often been read as if everything, in his thinking, was dependent on the possibility of having a hole-less discourse on politics, a discourse in which everything is in its place. And it has been said that the construction of the “communist” City in the Republic is under the ideal of such a hole-less political discourse.
Lacan didn’t care very much for the Republic.1 He said it was like a well-run horse breeding stable. But he didn’t conclude from this that Plato was appalling, totalitarian, etc., not at all! He concluded that, from one end of the dialogue to the other, Plato is pulling our leg. In other words, it was absolutely inconceivable that someone great like Plato—because for him, Plato was not just anyone—could have believed in such a horrible, depressing thing. So he thought the Republic was a fundamentally ironic dialogue. That’s an interesting hypothesis, because that great edifice, in which each thing is in fact enigmatically put in its place, would actually be an ironic demonstration of the fact that politics is a hole. The best proof that Plato, as revised in this way by Lacan, gives of this is that if you try to plug the hole, you wind up with the depressing figure of a well-run horse breeding stable. That’s irony in its purest form! It didn’t prevent Lacan, elsewhere, from claiming that this is nevertheless what philosophers do: plug the hole of politics, even if, at the same time, he attributes an irony to Plato that would actually be a monumental irony in history—I mean, literally, an irony in the form of a monument.
Except, is philosophy really as blind as all that? The basic question returns here: Is philosophy blind to the objection raised to its own enterprise? I don’t think so, even taking the extreme case of Plato’s Republic. Sure, there’s the great Platonic construction of the state: the distribution of places, the craftsmen and farmers linked in a one-to-one fashion with their tasks, and the philosopher guardians, selfless and ascetic, at the top. The least you can do, if you’re attempting to plug the hole of politics, is be part of the plugging yourself. So it stands to reason that, at the top, philosophy, or more precisely the dialectic, is doing the plugging. That’s exactly what Plato says: if you want a politics worthy of the Idea, then philosophers have to be in power. But you’ll note that, in the dialogue, Socrates’s interlocutors immediately sneer and say: “That’ll be the day!” And that objection runs insistently throughout the whole dialogue. At the point of the real of politics, then, at the point of what happens, Plato is not at all in the element of reabsorption or blindness. He knows that there’s a dangerous hole.
Three features of this dangerous hole can be mentioned, all of them essential for understanding the political construction in the Republic. First of all, the acknowledgment of multiplicity. Indeed, Plato’s system consists in saying that there are a number of political forms. That’s what the real is. There are tyrannies, there are democracies, there are oligarchies. And that’s what there is. So in no way is there any blindness on Plato’s part when it comes to the fact that there is politics. This “there is” is the “there is” of an irreducible multiplicity. Second of all, at the very heart of his construction Plato acknowledges the extraordinary precariousness of politics. “Precariousness” clearly means that something is never filled, that no hole is plugged forever. Third of all, he admits the chancy nature of his construction.
As for the precariousness of the different political forms, it has a threefold meaning.
First, every political form is compelled to change into another. None of the real political forms among the multiplicity of political forms is stable. Each obeys a process of self-disidentification and transformation into another political form. The classic example, in Plato’s eyes, is the inevitability of democracy’s transformation into tyranny, but that’s not the only one. In actual fact, any real form of politics suffers from a constitutive instability.
The second, even deeper, meaning of this precariousness is the fact that the “ideal” system proposed by Plato is itself precarious. Plato does not claim to be replacing the precariousness of the real political forms with a political form that would be freed from any precariousness. In one of his commentaries, admittedly a very strange but symbolically very striking one, he points out that, assuming his plan for the state were to come to pass, it, too, would be precarious; it, too, would eventually degenerate. It would inevitably turn into timocracy. The reason he gives for this—something psychoanalysts might consider!—is absolutely remarkable. It’s that, at a given moment, there will be a repression, a denial, a forgetting: the forgetting of a number. In order for the system to work, the leaders must have the numbers clearly in mind, because the coding of the ideal political construction assumes that each thing is in its place in a harmonic, numbered way, through precoded proportion, distribution, and apportionment. So there is a system of basic numbers that govern the construction. But what Plato explains to us is that memory will fail: someday, one of the most important numbers will be forgotten, will be lost. And, for once, we can see the hole of politics very distinctly today: it’s repression, in Freud’s sense of the term. The number will disappear in the leaders’ unconscious even though it’s the very symbol of civic order. And what’s a bit marginal, but remarkable, is the corrupting effect of that forgetting. Its empirical effect, its observable effect, will be that, in the educational curriculum, gymnastics will prevail over music. Something of the expressly military training will prevail over the generic element of intellectual and spiritual training. All of this is a sure sign that Plato is perfectly aware that any identification of politics must include its precariousness as an irreducible element. Even ideal politics—the politics that’s supposed to plug the hole of politics, to use Lacan’s phrase—is in fact, in this hole-to-come constituted by the retroaction of forgetting, a rupture of the subject’s unity. This is because this business about the primacy of gymnastics over music means that something of the inner organization of the citizen-subjects will come undone and give way to a military dictatorship for which the predominance of foot racing, swordsmanship, and horse racing has prepared the ground.
Finally, there’s a fundamental point, which is that the hole is inevitable in politics: Plato admits that the success of his project is ultimately a matter of chance. The ideal construction can only be real under iffy and unlikely conditions—atopical, excentered ones, what’s more. For example, he stresses the fact that it is surely not in his own City that someone who’s knowledgeable about this well-founded form of politics might achieve all, or part, of it. It will happen elsewhere, in some unknown place that is not his own place. And when Socrates’s interlocutors say to him: “Your philosophers will never be in power,” Socrates/Plato replies: “It might happen, it might happen.” But that’s all we’ll learn about it. The truth is that there’s no reason why it should happen, but no absolute reason why it shouldn’t happen either. The real hole is still there; it hasn’t been plugged. It’s just that, within the construction, the hole has been given a series of different names. As we’ve just seen, the hole of politics is indeed identified by Plato and named in three different ways: multiplicity, precariousness, and chance.
So I’ll conclude regarding philosophy’s relationship to politics in more or less the same way I did regarding its relationship to mathematics: even at the height of its will to foundation—and God knows that’s the case in Plato’s Republic—philosophy identifies something in politics that can’t be sutured but instead remains subjected to a sort of contingent hole that even the founding thought can’t close up. Because, clearly, multiplicity, precariousness, and chance are, for the founding thought, its real. The rest is its discourse. But its real is the impasse of its discourse. And it can easily be argued that Plato has a thorough understanding of the impasse of his own political formalization, an understanding attested to by these three names: precariousness, multiplicity, and chance.
At this point, we can turn to Lacan and say: “All right! Philosophy plugs the hole of politics.” (We don’t really think so, but let’s pretend we do.) What would not plugging it mean? What is the anti-philosophical political position? Is there an anti-philosophical politics, or a politics whose essence is not to plug the hole of politics? Does such a thing exist? When it comes to this issue, Lacanian theory is both radical and, frankly, difficult to grasp or understand, because it’s presented, in my opinion, only in metaphors. This is why people are still fighting over Lacan’s “political” teaching: it’s transmitted in an essentially metaphorical way.
Take the question of the group. In what conditions is it not under the sway of imaginary coalescence? In the statutory texts that accompanied the dissolution of his own School in 1980, Lacan expressly says that this imaginary effect must be avoided: what I’m creating here, he says, must avoid the group effect. And I quote: “The Cause freudienne2 must avoid the group effect that I condemn” (M, 18). It’s all well and good to say so, but how can the group effect be avoided? You’ve got to admit that his proposal is disappointing on that score because, for one thing, it’s already well known, and, for another, it’s more metaphorical than rational. What does avoiding the group effect consist of? It consists of proposals of permutation, nonhierarchical stabilization, lability or changeability of everything, and putting an end to consistency as the duration of the group. On March 11, 1980 Lacan declared:
The Cause freudienne is not a School but a Field. [This is a metaphor…“Field” will be characterized by lability, permutation, instability. Then, with regard to what he is creating, there comes the wonderful phrase:] From which it can be inferred that it [the School that’s a Field] will only last temporarily.3
And finally, there’s the abstract principle in which something like a quintessentially hyperdemocratic utopia can be noted:
[T]he collaboration of anyone with anyone else in the Cause [this time the metaphor will be that of swirling] is what we should aim to achieve, but in the long term: that it should swirl this way. (M, 19)
That’s all very well, but the truth is, what matters, the real principle, is dissolution. The Cause freudienne group will only last temporarily. But what is a temporary arrangement if not a recurrent resurgence that makes dissolution persist? Dissolution is an act in the sense that, from now on, it will persist. Ultimately, isn’t this the old matrix of utopian democratism as such? What I mean by utopian democratism is a particulate, atomic, or quantum egalitarianism: nothing but swirlings and coalescings of anything with anything else, in their swirling motions that define a temporary arrangement, which will later break apart. It’s similar to Lucretius’s world: a collision of atoms that produces temporary figures destined to break apart owing to their immanent precariousness. So we might wonder whether, if that’s the case, the situation isn’t simply that there are nothing but holes. It’s a radical process of detotalization, but does it constitute a politics? I see a kind of parallel between what Lacan identifies as political philosophy and his final statement about politics. On the one hand, in fact, the hole may have been plugged; each thing is in its place. But, on the other hand, the implicit norm is that there’s no more place at all. That’s truly what the field, the swirling, is: it’s a space without place. A space that’s essentially full of holes, made up of holes.
The problem is, it’s of the essence of politics to deal with the question of places, in accordance with a variable principle of what a dis-placement is. The approach purporting to found an eternity of placement (the traditional Plato) is certainly extrinsic to any real politics. But so is an approach that claims there’s nothing but the swirling of the nullified place, the omnipresent hole. If we accept that every politics proposes a displacement, then Lacan tells us nothing about politics, or, at any rate, he tells us nothing that hasn’t already been said in the well-established variants of anarchist-leaning radical leftism. His most radical proposals, which are the ones dealing with dissolution, express, in actual fact, Lacan’s true political vision, which I would call a tyrannical anarchism.
I’m saying “tyrannical” here without any value judgment. That’s right, without any value judgment, because I’m not a Platonist when it comes to this issue. To be sure, Plato didn’t like tyrants, but that was because, in ancient Greece as has often been the case elsewhere throughout space and time, they were the representatives of popular forces hostile to the aristocrats. That’s why he didn’t like them. Plato pretended not to like tyrants because they were bad men and thought only about their own desires. We know very well that, in reality, he didn’t like them because the tyrannical movements, in classical Greek society, were the breeding ground for constitutional reforms in a space that was more open than that of the reign of a handful of patrician families. So I’m taking “tyrannical” in the sense of the act, of the ability to act on oneself in the space of the group. That is indeed how Lacan operates in the “Letter of Dissolution” [T, 129–31], where he assumes a perfectly tyrannical position, which he calls the père-sévère [“stern father,” pun on the verb persévérer, “to persevere”] position. Lacan assumes the tyrannical position insofar as he is the one who, by withdrawing, ensures that everything falls apart and that he’s the only one to have such power. And in addition, he’s anarchistic—yes, profoundly so—because the ideal under which everything, including the tyrannical gesture of dissolution, occurs is that of the swirling motion without place. Except for his own place, after all, which is indestructible since it is solitary: “as alone as I have always been in my relation to the psychoanalytic cause” (T, 97). When you’re alone, you can’t leave your place: the place of solitude is the plus-one of all the other places. But this plus-one of all the others is the position of tyrannical anarchism. And this position is a classic, identified and identifiable one in the history of political forms and political philosophy. It’s by no means a new position, particular to the analytic discourse.
To conclude regarding this issue, at least for the time being, I would say that, on the one hand, Lacan fails to recognize that political philosophy identifies the political real as the impasse of its founding purpose, and, on the other hand, in the same way, that his own political gesture is not exempt from philosophy’s identification of politics, that it is identifiable from the very standpoint of philosophy. It is not so unique that it wouldn’t be identifiable in the process by which philosophy appropriates the identification of politics. Psychoanalysis, in this sense, remains silent about politics. Lacan didn’t create anything new in terms of politics; he didn’t introduce or establish anything new. Which would not, after all, constitute an objection if Lacan himself hadn’t raised the objection to philosophy that it plugs the hole of politics.
Once again, there was nothing but dissolution. Thus, the analysts were disbanded and disbanded they remain! That’s the situation of Lacanian psychoanalysis. They keep on disbanding. Because that is indeed the imperative that was bequeathed to them: “Disband!” But that imperative is better than many others. It’s certainly better than: “Come together!” or “Love one another!”
So that was the path followed by Lacan in politics: dissolution goes on and will continue to go on because there was nothing new established other than that. And, since each of them thinks the dissolution doesn’t apply to him personally, they restore things even while disbanding. Each individual analyst plugs the hole of politics! It’s probably a more compact plugging than the one philosophy is capable of, because, when it comes to plugging the hole of politics, you’ve got to admit that the analysts, when they put their minds to it, are second to none.
One last thing I’d like to point out: Lacan thinks that Marx had already seen that philosophy served to plug the hole of politics. This is a Lacanian interpretation, let’s say, of Marx’s last thesis on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” This can be understood as: philosophers have plugged the hole of politics with interpretations; the point is to unplug it, to open it back up. In Radiophonie, Lacan expresses this in a fine, Marxist anti-philosophical passage:
Question 5: What are the consequences [of the fact that the discovery of the unconscious led to a second Copernican revolution] as regards: a) science; b) philosophy; c) and particularly Marxism, or even communism? (AE, 431)
Answer: There is no clamor of being or nothingness [here he means the philosophers: Sartre and all the rest of them!]…that hasn’t been stilled by what Marxism has shown by its actual revolution: that there’s no progress to be expected from truth, nor any well-being, but only the shift from imaginary impotence to the impossible, which proves to be the real by being grounded only in logic: in other words, where I claim the unconscious is located, but not so as to say that the logic of this shift shouldn’t hasten the act. (AE, 439)
In short, in Lacan’s view, Marx showed that, instead of philosophical fantasies about the good state or the good society, it was the logic of Capital that had to be identified at the point of the real. Marx’s actual revolution is a liquidation of philosophy. Should we say that Marx substituted a science or knowledge for the philosophical imaginary? No, says Lacan, because we must maintain that the “logic of this shift” must “hasten the act.”
So you can see that the anti-philosophical critique of philosophy or metaphysics as plugging the hole of politics basically means: the hole of politics is unpluggable. Marx had already understood this clearly. It’s absolutely not a question of telling us what’s good—the good state or good politics—and of making progress in anything whatsoever. All of that is only imaginary impotence. What there is, is a logic that captures a real and requires the hastening of the act. In Lacan’s eyes, Marx is the one who invented the symptom, who invented a theory of jouissance. He’s the one who made a radical break with the philosophical view of politics. For Lacan, Marx is the correlation of a logic with an act; that’s the strongest point of subjectivation for Lacan in his relationship with Marx. It’s the correlation of a logic with an act, not at all of knowledge [connaissance] with a project.
That distinction is still extremely relevant, in my opinion. The “classical” view of politics defines it as a combination of knowing what the situation is and carrying out sound projects. But that image was ruled out by Marx, as Lacan characterizes him: politics is not knowledge and a project but a logic, hence an occurrence of the real, which requires an act. If politics is knowledge and progress, then it’s under the sway of meaning; it dispenses a meaning. If politics is logic and act, then it’s free of meaning, which means free of progress in all its forms, free of the very idea of the representation of progress.
So much for politics as an imaginary hole in the real, a symbolic hole in the imaginary coherence of discourses, and a real hole in the symbolic or in the law.
Let’s turn now to the last point, which I’m going to deal with pretty quickly: Why does Lacan say that love is at the heart of the philosophical discourse? First of all, what kind of love is it?
This is a very insistent question in the Lacanian corpus. There’s a first form of it—focused on the problem of love for the master, its explanation by transference love—in the analysis of Plato’s Symposium and of Socrates’s relationship to Alcibiades. The key point there, but which I won’t deal with right away, is that, for Lacan, there can be a love of knowledge [savoir] but never a desire for knowledge. This is what he states in the introduction to the German edition of his Écrits:
I insist: It is love that is addressed to knowledge. Not desire: because, when it comes to “Wisstrieb,” even if it has Freud’s stamp of approval, you can go back and look: there’s not the slightest bit of it. This is so much the case that it’s even the basis for the chief passion of the speaking being—which is not love, or hatred, but ignorance. (Scilicet 5, 16; AE, 558)
As you know, for Lacan, the human being’s three major passions are love, hatred, and ignorance. But, ultimately, the chief passion is ignorance. It is ignorance because there’s no desire for knowledge. This very radical thesis has perhaps not been sufficiently noted. The key position of love actually stems from the fact that it is the real subjective correlation with knowledge; there is no other. There may be a love of knowledge, but that love is not based on any desire.
This thesis opens up an abyss, aside from the fact that it’s not very easy to understand. But for the time being, let’s just take it literally. There’s no desire for knowledge. What there is may be love for knowledge. As far as desire is concerned, the human being’s absolute passion is ignorance. There’s such a lack of any desire for knowledge that ignorance, if I may put it this way, fills it up as passion. But there may be a love of knowledge. And what philosophy—according to Lacan—will graft onto that love of knowledge is the illusion of a love of truth. In his eyes, the major philosophical assumption is not only that there is a love of truth but that there must be a love of truth. The philosophical imperative—this is why it’s at the heart of philosophy’s discourse—would be: “You must love truth!” And maybe it’s even more forceful than that, something like: “Love truth more than you love yourself.”
Why, once again, is there an anti-philosophical accusation by Lacan? This will hinge less directly on the question of the love of truth than on what is loved in the love of truth. There are a lot of passages on this subject, but I’m going to use the following one, from Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, where Lacan asks: What is the love of truth? Locating himself within what he calls the discourse of the analyst, he will answer as follows:
The love of truth is the love of this weakness whose veil we have lifted, it’s the love of what truth hides, which is called castration. [He adds:] I should not need these reminders, which are in some way so bookish. [And then he’ll beat up on his usual counter-figures, the analysts:] It seems that it is the analysts, particularly they, who, because of these few taboo words with which their speech is soiled, never understand what truth is, namely, impotence.4
So there’s something that the analysts, who are Lacan’s whipping boys, don’t understand in the least, namely that the love of truth is the love of weakness, the love of what truth hides—in other words, the love of castration, ultimately. This will also be expressed as: the love of truth is the love of an impotence. After all, it’s clear what this means. It’s obvious that, for Lacan, there can be no love of truth except as love of what is impotent with respect to the whole. What the love of truth loves in it is the fact that it’s impossible to say it all, that it’s always only half-said. It’s this weakness, this impotence with respect to the All, that constitutes an object of love for the philosopher.
Furthermore, it’s clear that castration is hovering in the background as a figure of the access to the symbolic, and that, ultimately, there is no truth effect except under that condition. The love of truth must be the love of that condition itself, hence also the love of that which impedes, cuts, limits. And from whatever angle it’s approached, we understand very well that, if there is love of truth, it’s the love of a weakness, of an impotence, of a barring [barre], of a limitation, of a half-saying, and so on.
Lacan will draw several conclusions from this: that, where the analysts are concerned, it’s better not to love truth. There’s no point at all in loving it when you’re an analyst. However, loving knowledge—that, yes. You can see how this theme I mentioned at the outset is constantly in play; you can see the process by which the problem of the act comes into play as a result of the magnetism induced by the question of knowledge, while truth remains partly in shadow. Such is the anti-philosophical thesis. In contrast, the love of truth is at the heart of the philosophical discourse. But—and it’s here that Lacan’s case against philosophy finds its main argument—the philosopher purports to love truth as power and not as impotence. So we’d have to say that the Lacanian anti-philosophical statement doesn’t have to do directly with the question of the love of truth in its counter-position to the love of knowledge, although that’s one of its essential quibbles. It has to do with the fact that philosophy purports to promote and subjectivate the love of truth as power. And it is this pernicious illusion—which the analyst must avoid at all costs—that is at the heart of its discourse.
We’ll stop here for today. Let’s just say that the real Lacanian thesis is that, if you purport to love truth as power, if you reject the fact that all true love of truth is love of an impotence or a weakness, if you purport to love truth as power and not as weakness, then you’ll be helpless in the face of ignorance. This is a very powerful dialectic: in terms of subjectivation, you can block the passion for ignorance, which is, so to speak, the normal state of the human being, in terms of truth, only if what you love in truth is weakness. That may seem paradoxical, but it isn’t. The power of the love of truth, including its power to block ignorance, is precisely to be the love of a weakness, the love of a certain impotence. Ultimately, the love of truth is only powerful if it is the love of an impotence. Or else you have to have recourse to knowledge, to the love of knowledge, which, for its part, possesses real power. If you want neither one, neither the love of truth-weakness nor the love of knowledge-power, then the way is wide open for the passion for ignorance. At the point of the real, that passion can only be thwarted, Lacan tells us, by the love of knowledge as power or of truth as impotence. If you want the power of power rather than the power of weakness, then turn, not to philosophy, but to knowledge.
I’ll leave you with that “Turn!”