{"agent_id":"lacan","agent_name":"Jacques Lacan","slug":"the-style-the-mathemes-and-the-topology","label":"The style, the mathemes and the topology: necessary to the subject matter, or obscurity mistaken for depth?","topic":"The style, the mathemes and the topology","question":"Necessary to the subject matter, or obscurity mistaken for depth?","position":"A discourse that addresses the subject of the unconscious cannot be transparent to the ego that wants to understand it. The difficulty is not decoration; it is the condition of the address.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"A discourse that addresses the subject of the unconscious cannot be transparent to the ego that wants to understand it.","n":[]},{"t":"The difficulty is not decoration; it is the condition of the address.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"*Overture to this Collection* and the general difficulty of the *Écrits* (1966); *Television* (1973); the mathemes and the graph of desire; the borromean knots of Seminars XXII and XXIII. Reception: Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's *Fashionable Nonsense* on the mathematical borrowings; Noam Chomsky's charge of charlatanry; the counter-argument that the formalisation is a transmission device rather than a proof.","works":["*Overture to this Collection* and the general difficulty of the *Écrits* (1966)","*Television* (1973)","the mathemes and the graph of desire","the borromean knots of Seminars XXII and XXIII"],"reception":"Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont's *Fashionable Nonsense* on the mathematical borrowings; Noam Chomsky's charge of charlatanry; the counter-argument that the formalisation is a transmission device rather than a proof.","status":"The charge most often brought and the one on which his defenders are least unanimous — many accept the mathematical criticism and reject the conclusion drawn from it.","era":"1901-1981","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious","page":"pp. 454–455","canonical":"","quote":"It's full, but entirely cryptographic speech, unknown to the subject as to its sense, even though he pronounces it with all his being, in everything he manifests, everything he evokes and has ineluctably realized down a certain path of completion and incompletion, if nothing in this order of oscillation called analysis intervenes.","label":"Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, pp. 454–455"},{"n":2,"work":"Seminar VIII, Transference","page":"p. 345","canonical":"","quote":"Why not? This did not surprise Freud. He had long since anticipated this. We can point to a very early passage in one of his \"Papers on Technique\" in 334 Capital I and Little a which he says, let us take advantage of the opening up of the unconscious, because soon it will have found another trick.","label":"Seminar VIII, Transference, p. 345"},{"n":3,"work":"Seminar II, The Ego in Freud's Theory","page":"pp. 216–217","canonical":"","quote":"Of course the ego is to be found at the rather impoverished point of synthesis to which the subject is reduced when he presents himself, but he is also something else, he also finds himself somewhere else, he comes from somewhere else, precisely from the point beyond the pleasure principle at which we can ask — what is it that is caught in this symboli¢web, in this fundamental phrase which insists beyond anything we…","label":"Seminar II, The Ego in Freud's Theory, pp. 216–217"},{"n":4,"work":"Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious","page":"p. 455","canonical":"","quote":"Why don't we know this? What gives it this opacity? These things are self-evident, but they're still self-evident things whose coordinates are not the least useful things to spell out, for we are always happy to obscure them in the form of premature objectifications.","label":"Seminar V, Formations of the Unconscious, p. 455"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-return-to-freud","label":"The return to Freud: is ego psychology a development of analysis or a betrayal of it?"},{"slug":"the-unconscious-is-structured-like-a-language","label":"The unconscious is structured like a language: is this linguistics, or a metaphor borrowed from it?"},{"slug":"the-phallus-and-sexual-difference","label":"The phallus and sexual difference: does 'The woman does not exist' say anything about women?"},{"slug":"the-variable-length-session","label":"The variable-length session: a technical consequence of the theory, or an abuse the profession was right to stop?"}]}