The Names of the Father.
I can now introduce the fourth point: “The Names of the Father.”
When Lacan introduces it, in the only session of the seminar, the opening lesson, he points out that the previous year he studied the objet a, and argues that Hegelian dialectics is false.
Why does he remind us about the falsity of Hegelian dialectics to begin with “The Names of the Father?” It’s about something very specific: once one starts with the logic of the function, there is something one cannot reach. From then on, it’s about attaining the particular from the universal; that is the inherent weakness of any writing of the type ” x F(x).
What is the weakness with this universal formula? You may see it for example in the phrase “All unicorns are lovable.” This is true because they all appeared in works of art and are generally lovable. The unicorn has only a small defect: it doesn’t exist. Therefore, it is impossible to take issue with it. If you tell me that it’s not true, I will say, “Bring me a unicorn.” This means that the universal proposition says nothing about the existential, which is a deficit of that logic; if we start with the universal we will never proceed immediately to the existential.
It’s different when you say: ”There are some that are in this way, and there are some other that are otherwise.” So eventually Lacan introduces the exception that the universal needs to hold on to the existential. But at the level of the universal we only have the description of a concept, at the level of the universal proposition we are in the intension, which is the same as taking the concept. “Its Beauty” is a component of the concept unicorn and doesn’t allow the transferral into existence.
Thus the universal may correspond to an empty extension, for instance, “All the analysts know what the unconscious is.” Thus Lacan notes the fact that the concept of analyst speaks nothing on whether there is or there isn’t an analyst. We may think about the most elaborate concept of the analyst, but still we don’t know whether we deal with an empty or a full extension. Many suspect that such extension might be empty…
The Hegelian illusion—the Hegelian deception—suggesting that the universal could be coupled with the particular; that is that it can reach the place of the individual. At this point Kierkegaard’s objection is advanced against the master Hegel, who moves from the universal to the particular without difficulty. Kierkegaard says: “Anxiety.” He writes an essay on anxiety which declares: “Hegel, there is something that your dialectic will never get rid of, anxiety. It’s the anxiety you live through. All your logical constructions are helpless against the complaint it voices, the rebellion of the particular in me: my anxiety.”
And it’s the same Kierkegaard who inquires into the sacrifice of Abraham, who sets the scene for a God that doesn’t work quietly as the God of Descartes or the God of Malebranche. The God of Descartes does all his work, meaning he keeps the law of the world or he creates the world and then allows it to go. The God of Malebranche, by contrast, must hold the world continuously, that is, he creates the world but then it’s a continuous creation. He’s always busy doing things.
The God of Abraham’s sacrifice is a different matter. The God of Abraham’s sacrifice is not the God of the philosophers and sages, but the God of Isaac, Abraham and Jacob—this distinction is made by Pascal—it’s not a God as subject-supposed-to-know, but a God with a desire .
On the same line Lacan observes that we are not dealing with the Father as a figure of the law that he himself has made, it’s not a Father equivalent to the big Other, rather quiet, as a place. Because the Father of the law is a place, like with chairs, to give a seat. Thus, in the seminar The Psychoses, when he introduces the Name-of-the Father, Lacan speaks of the chair, of the stool to be seated.
However, God tells Abraham, “Arise.” It doesn’t say “Sit down,” but “Get up and make the sacrifice of your son.” This God is not the seat but the wandering in the desert, this God is coherent with the introduction of S(A) and its relation to the objet a, that is, with a figure of the Other without reason. And Lacan can say that owing to Freud we can go beyond the boundary stone he placed in the guise of the myth of the father’s murder.
In similar fashion, Lacan praises St. Augustine who, in De Trinitate, declares that God is not causa sui, that is, God is not Self-caused. Why is Lacan pleased with St. Augustine? Because the category of cause and effect is inapplicable to the Infinite Being. “But he who thinks that God is of such power as to have generated Himself, is so much the more in error, because not only does God not so exist, but neither does the spiritual nor the bodily creature; for there is nothing whatever that generates its own existence.” For to posit that God is causa sui entails that God brings Himself into being through his own concept. Causa sui means that from the essence, from the definition of the concept, one could come into existence.
Thus, there is a logical solidarity between Hegel’s dialectics, the Cartesiancogito and the ontological argument that is being challenged by “The Names of the Father.” They have the same logical structure because they deem feasible to go from the concept into existence. The Cartesian cogito, for instance, finds reasonable to move from a thought into existence, intoWirklichkeit, which in fact is the very structure of the ontological argument. In ”The Subversion of the Subject…” Lacan says that “the proofs of the existence of God have killed Him,” because finds Himself reduced to a logical consequence. To not kill God means to know that God exists if one loves Him.
This is a common truth. No one has come to believe in God because of the ontological argument which suggests that based on the concept of God, the essence of God, there is a transition to existence; that one can move from essence to existence and that from something that exists in intellectu you can move onto something that exists in re, factually.
Actually, it was Kant who developed the impossibility to go from the concept to existence. You can imagine a concept, a concept which is not contradictory, but being non-contradictory makes it only possible, never existing. In this respect Lacan is Kantian and anti-Hegelian.
However, the ontological argument might be saved, for instance, by returning to St. Anselm. I am sure that Lacan would have spoken of the ontological argument in the non-existent seminar “The Names of the Father,” because Saint Anselm’s quotation is almost a Name-of-the-Father:Aliquid Quo Nihil Maius Cogitari Possit, which is a partial quote translated into English as “a something, a greater than which cannot be conceived.” With this passage he tries to give evidence that this “something” necessarily exists. You may argue against the Kantian criticism by stating that this is not a real concept since it reveals a limitation of thinking—actually, it’s a sentence that goes way beyond the concept, over the limits of thinking.
That’s pretty interesting because the only way to challenge, against Kant, the ontological argument is to demonstrate that the definition, the description or the concept, which is taken as the starting point of cogitation, in fact describes an impossibility. As a result, we get God not so much asexistence but as real.
And all those who advocate Kant’s ontological argument, they do so in the Lacanian way, that is, they make the case that there is an inability to think and from that apparent inability to think one can deduce a reason to think the real. It’s from the impossible that the real arises.
So that Alexander Koyré, defender of the ontological argument, and Étienne Gilson—all friends who were read by Lacan—favored the ontological argument as an indirect evidence. But we are not dealing with a concept here, the impossibility in thinking is just taken an as the starting point.
It can also be noted that Saint Anselm does not only speak of maius, the greater. Elsewhere he speaks of melius, the best. This “best” shows that the ontological argument is not only ontological—a word that comes long after Saint Anselm—but is also an ethical argument concerning the supreme good.
Saint Anselm said: Aliquid Quo Nihil Maius Cogitari Possit, “a something, a greater than which cannot be conceived.” He speaks of it as that which is beyond thinking when he says: O immensa bonitas, quae sic omnem intellectum excedis, “Oh, immeasurable goodness, who exceeds all understanding.” In fact Saint Anselm is addressing the goodness and putting goodness in lieu of the essence, therefore going beyond the concept. We cannot really understand the ontological argument if we don’t give precedence to faith. Saint Anselm’s title itself proves the case: Fides quaerens intellectum, “Faith Seeking Understanding.” It is faith that wants to understand about what is going on. Saint Augustine insists that lntelligere vis crede, “Whom do you want to understand? First you must believe.”
What does the ontological argument keep saying? That for every thing that exist, one can always think that there is something bigger, Φ(x), and yet one may find something for which nothing is bigger, for which nothing bigger can be tought. This answers one of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation:
We should break this down a little to better see the subtlety therein, since verily the ontological argument states: ”Every thing might be thought, and might be thought always, with something bigger.”
To God there is something that can be thought and of which nothing bigger can be thought, the question resides in whether this is thinkable or not. Is it an impossibility to think or may it be a possible thought? Here the authors are divided: if it’s thinkable, then we start with a concept; if it’s an impossibility, then the description given by Saint Anselm is a quasi-concept, a pseudo-concept; in fact, it poses only the impossibility of thinking.
Lacan’s solution is very simple: it doesn’t matter if it’s unthinkable, it can be written. And the writing of a stands for something, no matter how unthinkable, since it can be written.
Thus, Lacan posits that God is not causa sui. To say that God is causa suisignifies that it’s possible to go from the concept to existence without a as a cause, as irreducible cause. Causa sui, as the ontological argument, function as a reduction of a. And every time Lacan comments the Cartesian cogito or the causa sui, he re-establishes the a.
In “Science and Truth” he sets up the a in the Cartesian cogito and ponders as well over the causa sui. On that account, he is against the Augustian translation of the imposing sentence that the God of Israel utters to Mosesehyeh ascher ehyeh, which Saint Augustine translates as Ego sum qui sum (I am who I am); Lacan says that it must be translated as “I am what I am,” as God appears as a real without concept.
The concept of God is not the Other of the concept, is not the Other of the signifier. The God in question is a; it has the status of a real without concept, and around that revolve the Names of the Father, which seek to imprison it, to conceptualize it.
That is the aim of the investigation of the pass, to the analyst—as the God of Israel—to stand as a and say: “I am what I am,” and in this way be able to justify the access he has obtained to his name of jouissance.
To consider the idea that God is a instead of the Other may surprise you. But you have to look into at what Freud tells us when he reflects on the totem as the primitive form of the divine, when he presents us with an animal God. The animal so captivating, fascinating for the human religious because it escapes the lack of being of the speaking being. For this reason in almost all of Freud’s cases, the names of being, as the subject’s name ofjouissance, are animals: rats, wolves; and there is little Hans, the child of the horses. There is also Dora though, who is “the woman of men,” another type of animal! And of course, there is Schreber. But in Schreber’s case, God himself makes an appearance. Schreber is “the man of the gods,” because God comes forward with all of his names; we just know Hormuz and Ahriman, but we know there are others…
Now, perhaps, I can take on a fifth point: “Father and Jouissance.”
I will highlight this sentence from “Subversion of the Subject…” where Lacan suggests: “But what is not a myth, although Freud formulated it as early on as he formulated the Oedipus myth, is the castration complex.” This makes evident that after having made this extraordinary conjuction between the Oedipus complex, the castration complex and Totem and Taboo with the paternal metaphor, Lacan proceeds, however, from the disjunction of the Oedipus complex and castration.
In his notorious paternal metaphor Lacan maneuvers the terms offered by Freud, that is, the father, the mother and the child, to position a fourth term, namely castration, the phallus. But we know that after that classic moment in his teaching, Lacan—he not only does the linguistic transcript of the Oedipus myth—conceives the Oedipus complex as myth through which Freud himself attempted to explain how jouissance was lost. As if jouissanceand its loss were capital. And perhaps children, but surely the analysts also, had to construct a myth to explain why it was lost.
As the myths that recall the discovery of fire, as those which explain the existence of the earth, the sky, men and women, the myth of Oedipus was just, within psychoanalysis itself, a way to tell why there was something broken in jouissance, and so it reveals that it was because of a ban.
Lacan answers are different. If there is loss of jouissance it’s not because of that remarkable story, the reason lies in that, first, pleasure itself sets limits tojouissance. Ther body’s own homeostasis prevents jouissance to go beyond a certain point and that to go further implies the crossing of the barrier of pleasure towards pain, which is the Sadean way.
And one scheme to go further in the pursuit of pleasure, to go beyond the limits of pleasure for those who lack the vocation of the Marquis de Sade, is the symptom, which brings in suffering. One “makes” symptom in order to experince suffering (on oneself), but the Marquis de Sade too. The Marquis de Sade, who allegedly brought suffering to others, managed to be imprisoned for half of his life, and Lacan stresses that the secret of the Marquis de Sade was his masochism.
So, if it is pleasure that sets the limits to jouissance, what is the history of the law? What is the story of the Father figure of the law? We should call him by his name: it is a semblant. Lacan, far from raising the law to a dimension where it becomes the final answer in psychoanalysis, makes of him a semblant. Besides, it is not enough to say that pleasure sets the limits tojouissance, but that language as such has the same effect on the body of the speaking being: jouissance torments him.
So the structure of the signifier is enough, or the structure of the real, of the symbolic, of the imaginary, to account for the loss of jouissance.
And what comes to be that sort of surplus Name-of -the-Father? The Name-of-the-Father designates the power of the word. So that the Names of the Father, which you can look for, are all myths that narrate the loss ofjouissance. They tell about someone, someone in command, who stealsjouissance. It’s not the appropriation of the fire, as in the case of Prometheus, it’s the theft of jouissance: “While I was sleeping someone came and stole my jouissance.”
The Names of the Father are stories that can be look for, stories that attempt to explain the displacement, the transfer of jouissance towards the Other.
Lacan says that perhaps the most fundamental of The Names of the Father might be that of the Mother Goddess, which belong to the cults that precede the Names of the Father. The Jewish cult of the Names of the Father superseded the Mother Goddess. Perhaps the earliest of the Names of the Father is the name of the Mother and alludes to a book by Robert Graves, The White Goddess, which, I must say, I had given him.
This introduces the “logification” of the Name-of-the-Fathers, which we find in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis as the master signifier, which is the heir of the Name-of-the-Father and of the Names of the Father, but abstracted, sun-dried, as a pure logical function devoid of the myth.
Thus, Lacan board together the Oedipus complex, castration and Totem and Taboo with metapsychology, he explains how the libido has been evacuated from body, yet it stays as a. So we may say that the a refers to what resists the universalizing operation of the Name-of-the-Father and, in that sense, the Name-of-the-Father covers a. This doesn’t mean that the Name-of-the-Father is under a veil, the Name-of-the Father itself is the veil that covers the loss of jouissance and the residue of jouissance that resists to the universalizing exertioin, which says no to the fact of “jouissance to be in your body.”
This appears, grossly I might say, in the prohibition of masturbation, when we declare: “Do not look for your jouissance in your own body but in the body of the other sex.” The prohibition of masturbation says so rudely because actually jouissance on oneself doesn’t exist. What would be jouissance on oneself? It would be phallic jouissance, but it would appear outside the body, independently, since any body marked by the Name-of-the-Father becomes the site of the signifier, the site of this mark, the big Other, emptied of jouissance.
So a appears always detached from the Other. Sometimes in neurosis it can only be found in clandestinity with respect to the Other, and the subject may inadvertently get lost in the task of embodying what the Other lacks. In paranoia, instead, the Other and a meet and becomes manifested in the awareness that the Other jouit of me, whereas in schizophrenia it’s thejouissance that returns to the body which destroys the very limits of the body. Here, we might talk about feminine dementia and the paradox that woman be the Other to herself.
In conclusion I would like to stress that the metapsychology of the Name-of-the-Father is not only a metaphor, is not only expressed through the metaphor, that is through the metaphor of the Other’s jouissance.
Next to the metaphor of jouissance, recurrent in the paternal metaphor, there is the metonymy of jouissance. The metaphor is a substitution, a deletion, and we obtain an effect of meaning.
Then, why is metonymy more suited to jouissance? Because it entails displacement, a place-shifting function.
Freud introduced the libido to explain that jouissance is untransferable; it’s transferable but cannot be annulled since it moves elsewhere. In “The Subversion of the Subject…” Lacan suggests that jouissance can only be said in between the lines, which is the function of metonymy. He develops this further, clearly and without ambiguity, in “Radiophonie” where he contrats the metaphor, which operates on meaning, and the metonymy, which functions on jouissance.
Lacan conceives the unconscious as an extractive mechanism, which takes from jouissance, that is, conveying jouissance to the unconscious. He then envisages the analytical work as transferring jouissance to the signifier. As he puts it, “The business of shifting jouissance to the unconscious necessitates a crafty movement.”
At this juncture, we might inquire into whether the signifier of A. would or wouldn’t be the name of the objet a.
