The Proper Name.
Something should be said on proper names since, apparently, there is a chapter of the non-existent seminar that deals with proper names both in linguistics and mathematical logic. All this seems like Borgean dream, an entire morning reading and studying a seminar that does not exist!
The proper name is, in language, what, par excellence, is not translated, that which is repeated. Obviously, when it comes to writing and to a language that has a different writing, we have a transliteration; that is to say that we use different written signs to lead the reader into making the same sounds as in the original language. It is very odd to see one’s name in Japanese… But the fact that a proper name is what is not translated into another language makes it resemble to a matheme in so far as it susceptible of integral transmission; you don’t look for an equivalent.
Sometimes there are proper names that are common nouns, but they are not translated into another language. For in that case I would call myself Meunier, because Miller does not exist in French as a common noun, whereas it has a meaning in English. This would indicate that now I’m being Lacan’s miller and that in French I would be called Meunier.
Consequently, the proper name is equivalent to a matheme and its association with language becomes a downright issue. With the proper name we don’t inquire about its meaning, but about its reference, for instance, we ask if Jacques-Alain Miller arrived on time or if he hasn’t. You may inquire about its reference but not about its meaning. If we wish to study its signification—we might work on the meaning of a proper name, for example, by separating its phonemes—we will bring it down to the level of a common noun. For that reason, Lacan argues that the analyst accepts to turn his name into a common noun, thereby lending it to the analysand, and this name will eventually reappear as fragmented in the formations of the unconscious. I will not go into that.
Also, proper names hold a connotational meaning. For instance, they can locate an origin, which is what makes it so fun for an European who can track down in the diversity of names that are present in America and how they may indicate an origin: Irish, Italian , Central Europe, Middle East and so on. Yesterday I bought a volume with three thousand proper names. It looked fun, but it is only proper names… Proper names are intended for names, however, in a proper name there are the first name and the family name and the weight is on the family name. We must take this distinction into account since the “Names of the Father” are actually said in French. Nobody ever thought that they are the “father’s names” (noms de famille). In English there is the first and then there is the family name, and in French there are prénom and nom. A proper name is made of a name and a last name, a nom and a prénom, the conjunction of the two, in both languages.
Proper names are words that don’t signify, instead they refer, which fall within Frege’s division between Sinn und Bedeutung, which Lacan used and which convey a specific difficulty to discursive reason. For how do we deal, for example, with ordinary language? We may manage, in the manner of Frege, by distinguishing between function and argument; that means opening a gap in the sentence, precisely where the proper names are, and the rest is worked out with a function.
The writing of the phallic function, namely, that which allows us to say “the element x has the property F,” F (x), “responds to the function F” or “has the property F,” all this leads to the disappearance of the proper names. The x is not a proper name and it means that several elements can be replaced. It means that x is essentially interchangeable, whereas the proper name is essentially irreplaceable. In psychoanalysis we find these irreplaceable elements for the subject, for instance irreplaceable fantasms.
The logical treatment of the proper name started with Bertrand Russell in 1905, when he tried to elucidate the proper name utilizing the Fregean function. In his a famous article, called “On denoting,” he deals with the theory of definite descriptions. The problem he had to solve was how to explain the fact that a definite description, i.e. the description of a reference—which accounts for a proper name because it has to locate one and only one as, for instance, “the present King of France”—may not include anyone who falls under that expression. How can we clean language from those expressions that are in themselves misleading because they make believe there is someone when in fact there is no one (there is no “the present King of France”)?
He chose this example because at the time there was a King in England and this well-known example is remind us of the seminar ”The Names of the Father.” We say the seminar “The Names of the Father” when in truth there is no seminar “The Names of the Father.”
How to account for the fact that we have the concept of “the present king of France” and that nobody corresponds to this description, to this concept? For him, this amounts to say, “I did not know that Walter Scott was the author of Waverley,” that is to say “I didn’t know that the description, the concept, ‘the author of the novel Waverley’has to do with the existence of Walter Scott’s proper name.”
Now, how to explain this? The solution is in the fact that we need first to differentiate the concept or function, F (x), that is “the present king of France,” and then add another formula that says: “there is no element that corresponds to that description.”
There are two aspects: the concept and the existential dimension. The answer, and this matters, lies in the disjunction between the intension of the concept, its definition, and the extension of the concept. Intension doesn’t mean “wonderful” and extension doesn’t signify “low quality” as, I don’t know why, it has become common in psychoanalysis since the time Lacan spoke about intension and extension. Intension is the definition of a concept, for example, the definition of psychoanalysis, the definition of the psychoanalyst. Extension is what exists underneath, that is, the analysts and the apparatuses they make use of to operate. All these belongs to the extension, and the rest involves the definition of psychoanalysis.
Russell’s solution, which since then has been addressed by a vast literature, somehow reveals the proper name as a set of properties. It is as if someone’s proper name could be deciphered as the signifying agent of a set of properties.
It means that this “someone” responds to the property F (to be born on a specific day), plus the property F’ (to be mentioned in a biographical dictionary as having died on a specific date, at a particular place), plus the property F” and so on.
It’s an infinite list that would be shortened by the proper name. This might lead us to consider whether this set of properties has always existed or hasn’t. Let’s pass over this. It looks like an infinite set.
Saul Kripke, in a noted article from 1972—an article which Lacan was prompt to cite when he introduced in logics the Leibnizian possible—considers the question differently.
“I do not know that Walter Scott wrote Waverley” can be translated as: “There is a possible world where he didn’t write Waverley,” or “There is a possible world where Walter Scott is known but where it is not known that he wrote Waverley.” That does not prevent Walter Scott to exist as a proper name, which remains despite the fact that this property is not known to me.
With this argument you can eliminate all the properties of the name. I thought Sir Walter Scott used to live in the seventeenth century. We are mistaken mistaken by two centuries! But that doesn’t prevent the proper name to prevail.
Therefore he infers that the proper name is not the summary of a list of properties but what he calls a rigid designator, that is, a pure signifier. It is his way of saying that it’s a pure signifier, that it’ not a signification always fluid and flexible of concepts or properties.
Somehow, Kripke’s argues that the proper name deletes all properties. We can write it in the Lacanian way:
This very well agrees with what Lacan states in ”The Subversion of the Subject…” where he declares that the proper name means nothing, that it has no other signification besides its utterance, which precisely defines the proper name as a rigid designator. Earlier, in “The Signification of the Phallus,” Lacan declared that “The subject designates his being only by barring everything it signifies.” We should note that this would be the same term Kripke will use at a much later date.
What it’s been introduced in the problematics of the proper name—which is part of the problem of the Names of the Father—is how to designate its being. I may designate this being by way of the proper name which is the Name-of-the-Father in the common usage; I may designate it either by the I or by a proper name whicht is the Name-of-the-Father. Moreover, there are feminists who entirely reject the husband’s surname, choosing instead the surname of their own father, as if their father’s name would be closer to their own being.
But any classification based on the proper name in fact designates the subject as being already dead: it’s the name that will be engraved on its tomb. Sometimes it is essential for the name to be on the gravesite. I have heard the case in which a dead fetus, who had not been buried according to the accepted rites, returns in the symptoms of the subject until a symbolic burial takes place where the analyst holds a prominent position; before that the dead fetus kept returning in dreams as if something was missing in the pacification of the name.
I don’t want to speak against proper names, but the proper name categorizes the subject as always already dead. In “The Subversion of the Subject…” Lacan calls into question the Name-of-the-Father: at the same time that he becomes suspicious of the mystery of Abraham—when he introduces the signifier A—he is looking for definitions other than the Name-of-the-Father or the proper name to designate the being of the subject as a living being, since the proper name, the Name-of-the-Father, doesn’t allow the naming for what is alive in the subject.
As a result Lacan introduces jouissance when in the above mentioned écrithe states: “a being who appears in some way missing from the sea of proper names.” We will discuss why he writes “the sea.”
He writes “the sea” because he doesn’t write “set,” we don’t know where it stops, where it halts. It’s something that the subject, as I (Je), doesn’t know: the subject, as subject of language, doesn’t known whether he is alive or dead. This happens every time we quote Lacan. How do we say? “Lacan says…,” and again “Lacan says…,” and it makes no difference whether Lacan is alive or dead when we say it. As if Lacan would keep saying for ever and ever…
Thus, the argument of “The Names of the Father” becomes the answer to the question: “What am I (Je)?” We find it in “The Subversion of the Subject…,” namely that “I am in the place of jouissance.” This is Lacan’s answer.
We may then sum up that what is set in motion with “The Names of the Father” is that, in analysis, I’m looking for my name of jouissance. That is to say that I’m looking for a suitable name to designate the being in the sea of proper names. The a is not a proper name, it’s its matrix; or we might say that it’s the proper name as reduced to a pure matheme. We might guess that it’s this formula: a. I would say that—at the same time—it’s not a proper name or that it’s the root of the proper name. It’s the proper name as reduced to the pure matheme a.
Consequently, the writing a is fundamentally different from the writing (x). Whereas the latter designates a variable, the former entails a constant. And because of this, it’s “almost” equivalent to a proper name. It’s s a constant. The a is irreplaceable, and Lacan returns repeatedly to what at the end analysis could or should be articulated as “I am my a,” or “I am this a, beyond the Name-of-the-Father.”
When we attempt a diagnosis, what are we trying to do? We try to classify the subject in the light of a clinical structure. We say “an obsessional neurotic,” “a hysteric,” “a psychotic” and so forth. It is not the proper name. When the proper name shows up in the clinic, it’s more like the Rat Man or like the Wolf Man, where the proper name—in the clinic—is not the Name-of-the-Father. The definite description of the Wolf Man has nothing to do with Sergei Petrov nor with the function of the Name-of-the-Father; it’s his name of jouissance.
The a would be, a name which is not a metaphor, as if it could designate the truth of jouissance of the subject.
For this reason, Lacan wanted to begin with his seminar “The Names of the Father” after that of “Anxiety,” since the latter was devoted to the objet a. Accordingly, if there is objet a, we must conclude that there is no Name-of-the-Father, there are the Names of the Father, pluralized. Eventually, the seminar “The Names of the Father” brings to a conclusion a series that he begun with “The Identification” (1961-2) and “Anxiety” (1962-3).
Identification answers to the question of what am I (Je). Psychoanalysis first response is identification, that is, the distinction between the imaginary identification and the symbolic identification.
Lacan sets up his seminar upon the subject’s lack of identity, which is the point of departure to understand why it must identified, why identification is a must: the subject’s lack of identity. Lacan differentiates the imaginary identification from the symbolic identification of the Ego Ideal.
But in that answer—which is the answer of the Graph of desire—we start with the S, and the whole circuit ends up answering the identification with an attribute of the Other. This is the summary of the entire graph:
However, Lacan studies the identification to show that there is an element in excess, under tension, which is the objet a:
Then Lacan substitutes the answer with the identification with the answer with the being of jouissance:
If at the level of desire, the answer to “What am I (Je)?” might be an identification, then, concludes Lacan, identifications, since Freud, are determined by desire. In “On Freud’s Trieb and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire” he writes: “Identifications are determined by desire without satisfying the drive.” The “without satisfying the drive”—an identification that doesn’t satisfy the drive—signifies that there is a name other than that which derives from the insignia of the Other. And this is a and what the seminar “Anxiety” highlights: the deficiency of everything that pertains to the register of identification, even the symbolic identification.
