The Forgetting of the Real or the Joui
François Laruelle
In Théorie des étrangers: science des hommes, démocratie, non-psychanalyse (Paris: Kimé, 1995), p.183-201.
The Greco-Judaic Antinomy of Psychoanalysis
The One is for the moment a Greco-metaphysical ideal or a Judaico-religious passion. As One-in-One, or as the One destined to renew the problem of “jouissance” and the “real,” it is still “facing us.” That some psychoanalysts, in general those dedicated to managing the Lacanian heritage, bring the One into play (even from afar) indirectly concerning “jouissance,” directly concerning the “signifier-One,” and finally concerned with the constitution of an “impossible” science of man under the form of a theory of the subject, is the sign that both the thought in some have awoken from their Greek dream and are prepared for a possible renewal, but that this thought remains prisoner to old prejudices despite everything. Finally in a motivated and argumentative way, the lack of consistency of Heidegger’s unfortunate formula (“science does not think (like philosophy)”) is denounced elsewhere or denounced now, but it’s so little surprising how there are those who still think through Greek prejudices. One suggests that science also is “plugged” into the One, undoubtedly secondarily still, and chiefly “plugged” into the Other. Thus, science is “plugged” into the highest instances of thought. The problem is to determine how we understand this formula “otherwise.” In reality, for Heidegger, the formula means that science does not truly think, but understanding it otherwise should here include analysis and science in general within an entire and autonomous thought. To this end, what we propose is very different from Lacanianism: science as assumed already constituted does not solely use the One in general. The One, rather, is the instance that gives science the power of thought. The One and the unified theory that results from it are perhaps no longer on the side of the “Unconscious” or the “Other” than they are on the side of the “Conscious” and “Being,” but define another instance of the real and therefore another instance of jouissance, which is found to be “the-last-instance” par excellence, a concept which should even unsettle the unconscious. However, this kind of attempt – which makes up the conjuncture – is for us precious, at least as the “symptom” of an abandonment of the indefinitely narcissistic games of philosophy for the problems of a really human science. Who could doubt that the tasks of an elucidation of the essence of the intrinsic unity of man, philosophy and science at the sign of the One would be in all respects less flippant than the “question of Being” which has been a new attempt to obscure them?
The multiplicity of the ways in which the One is traditionally said (or the modes of its efficacy) is probably not re-interiorizable within a unique history. Not only do we distinguish from these modes of the One its essence of radical immanence insofar as its denegation is the condition of exercise for philosophical belief, but within the very interior of these modes, the biblical One for example is obviously foreign to the Greek One like the One (of) the Other – or One (of) the signifier – is for the One (of) the Same. The biblical One does not let itself be reappropriated by the ontological style of the Greeks but, rather, deconstructs it. Some analysts or some mathematicians (sometimes the same, but all are post-Lacanian), explore this other One, through set theory in which they draw unexpected effects which are sometimes of the order of the unconscious and the letter, and sometimes of the order of a set-theoretical ontology of the Void. Rather than an extension, what matters is a differentiation and inversion, undoubtedly a “break [cassure],” within the theory of the One where it traditionally dominates the Multiple which henceforth represses it on its periphery. One extends the scope of set theory, conceiving this extension as a “transference” or as ontology par excellence and inverts the hierarchy to the benefit of the Multiple, at the expense of the One. One describes a heterogeneity of logics and theories, sometimes even a pure or inconsistent multiple having become the content of Being, and one no longer evokes the One but under the form of their overlaps, entanglements, “blends,” but as a real phenomenon but an utterly secondary one. The post-Lacanian analyst makes the dream work and a certain chaos of languages (theoretical or ordinary languages) resonate. Thus, the analyst practices the One, but, in any case, as One (of) the Other or One of the Signifier, and more or less ordered to the Signifier or the Multiple. Summarily, the analyst does not apply mathematics to the “subject” but puts us to the test of the improbable communication of orders, affecting us with the undecidable, sometimes makes the One what renders science’s own impossibility possible. The analyst strives to “partialize” or disperse the unconscious, bringing it to the limits of the void. In their own way, a way that is entirely mathematical and sensible, full of language and effect, the analyst deconstructs a Freudo-Lacanian orthodoxy in the name of the void or the multiple or their identity, an orthodoxy which was content with passing a still homogenous and substantialist conception of the unconscious onto another, substituting logico-linguistic identity with its old biologico-mechanistic identity. However, in both cases, there is a fall or degradation of the old Greco-metaphysical “One” to the benefit of the ascending hegemony of the Multiple, a hegemony that forms the epoch or conjuncture but consummates the forgetting of the essence of the real-One.
What can I know of man? To this question that is still inapparent as such in the eyes of philosophy and perhaps even – though to a lesser extent – of psychoanalysis, we can attempt to respond in reality (human) grounded way and rigorously (scientifically) way only through the transcendental position or hypothesis of the real as One-in-One rather than as One-of-the-Other or One-of-the-Multiple: as One (of) the Joui rather than as One of the Unconscious. The conquest of this theoretical basis should allow us to elaborate a positive relation, a use rather than a critique, towards attempts like those that we examine. For example, that psychoanalysis does not exhaust the essence of man, that not more than philosophy does not reach this essence, and was done to reach other targets, is one of the effects of the conquest of the essence of the Real or the Joui as radical immanence.
In philosophy and psychoanalysis, therefore, there is something of the One in multiple senses. However, they both have in common being mixed or transcendent uses which efface the One’s identity. For example, either these definitive formulae of a mathematical analyst all come down to combine the One and the Other in undecidable blends, even systems, and to reduce the One to the role of the trait of the signifier: “a ‘Universe’ U which is the One, all of the sets in question, connected between them through the game of the relation of belonging”; “the logic of the One passes through the Other and inversely,” in some sort that their complex entanglement is to be thought about; “mathematics (is)…the spirit of the Letter in search of the effects of the One within the real.” Or: “in human groups, the one that each believes to form is pierced by the One which bears on their whole language and bears on it towards its point of silence.” Thus, this is what we say of the One: as “set-theoretical.” With some Judaic nuances, nearly nothing here distinguishes philosophy and psychoanalysis in the denegation of the Joui, both are reinscribed within the most constant invariants of Greek thought. Is it because these invariants are otherwise the “confusion” of the One and Being, then the One and the Other or the Signifier to the extent that division or transcendence are rendered irreducible to each other and tend towards “privation” or “lack”? Or otherwise the reduction of the One to the functions of synthesis and totalization, analysis and de-totalization then dissemination and alteration, unicity and the existence of the signifier, namely reduced to these subaltern functions which assume unelucidated its own essence? Or again otherwise the division of the Real into the One of jouissance, the One of the unconscious and the metaphysical One on the one hand, and the empirical and “human” real on the other hand? Or, lastly, otherwise this necessary passage from the One through language, a passage that is sometimes called “philosophy,” sometimes called “analysis”?
Thus, armed by the Letter and the Tradition together, flanked by all the confused forces of the “One,” “Being,” and the “Other – close to the inversion of their hierarchy – thrown together into battle, post-Lacanianism pursues the work of Freud and cuts man, the Real and Jouissance into pieces in the names of the recast, the bias and the gap, différance, the pure multiple and set theory. There subsists some residues wherein one equivocal and transcendent concept of jouissance fails to detach itself from “energy.” This levelling through the universal crumbling, this absolute loss of the intrinsic identity of the Real, is the most interesting of the analytic affair: it is a symptom of a global refusal to think (by defect of “symbolizing” it) Jouissance in the name of the new good conscious of the “Other” that is assumed to exhaust the unconscious with the hubris of transcendence – this is a contortion of the old philosophical authorities urgently called back to the front line. The philosophers, with the deconstructors in the vanguard, do not react otherwise, do not fear this vicious and miraculous reasoning by invoking the existence (and therefore the authority) of philosophy as the ultimate legitimation of its “reality.” Philosophers and analysts hang on to philosophy and analysis respectively like the Baron Munchausen: it is nothing but normal in this refusal to “uncling.” It is simply one such authoritarian refusal that has never prevented, elsewhere and in some others, the liberty and necessity to think without a miracle through phenomena alone.
All of these traits obviously make up a system and their pertinence is assumed to feed the “forgetting” of the essence of the One. The One, the “Joui,” perhaps has no need for a support like Being or even like the Signifier to be the Real itself; nor does it have the need to be divided and multiplied into amphibological concepts to be this Real; nor again does it need to fulfill direct functions outside of itself, as if the Real itself should technologically and continuously act over exteriority (Jouissance, the “motor” or “efficient cause” of unconscious labour). Philosophy and analysis are not the accidental “fall” of the One onto Being or the Other (at least they don’t derive from it) because they are this continuous fall itself: they correspond to another experience than the experience of the One or the Real. The Ego-One and the Stranger, the Joui and unconscious jouissance are in reality given radically, namely within their own essence rather than in essences of substitution and the anonymous essences like “Being” and the “Other”; they are as included within the immanence of the human posture in general and in the ultimate – not simply supposed – experience that man is the “last-instance” of the knowledge that they can acquire touching on their being. The One is the experience of that which, from the One-itself, is only given; it is the grasp and jouissance (of) oneself – the “Joui”-before-any-jouissance, the phenomenal content of analytic “jouissance” – before being touched by any such transcendence in the form of representation and divided by the model of psychic energy into exterior forms. A science of man is that which guards this One against its sacrifice within the vapors of Being or in the perplexed speech of the Other. This science guards the Ego-in-Ego (not the Cartesian subject) as the only real instance, as the true concept of jouissance when it is comprised phenomenally and no longer energetically, manifesting the Ego-in-Ego as the “last-instance” that does not need to be humanized through its entry into the politico-philosophical order or even into the symbolic order, but which determines in-the-last-instance alone and no longer efficiently the labour of the Unconscious. This One allows us to host the Other without negating or dissolving it a bit more, while the Other or the “first” unconscious can only respond to the nothing-but-One through a crumbling and a formalism, an exterior relation of affect and the letter, and jouissance and the unconscious, which result in a global effect of non-receiving. The human generosity of these “instases” – the One, Being, the Other – is at the extent of their minimum, not their “withdrawal” but their immanence or identity, which leaves a free place – an em-placement – for the effects of the signifier as an example.
The analysts cannot complain about being misunderstood here because a unified theory admits without discussing – this is not its object – the theoretical, practical and affective pertinence of their way of doing and do not deny at all – except in its transcendental sufficiency – in welcoming into analysis (above all Lacanian analysis) the utterly serious existence of a theory of the subject. However, what is essential of what we say of the One-in-One, they cannot however admit: to the point that they do not even see what we say about it. We do not speak of the same One nor the same Jouissance. More exactly, the analysts speak of the One of the metaphysical traditional to reduce it to an operation or a simple limit, to negate its being, to invert its primacy to the benefit of the Other or the Multiple, indeed to reduce it to the arithmetical One, while we speak of the still unelucidated essence of this One and its uses, even analytic uses; we speak of the amphibology of the Joui and Jouissance which still philosophically restrains psychoanalysis. It is through resistance and precipitation that they tend to falsify what a general science of man must understand with the equation One = Real = Joui-sans-jouissance, and give it a globally metaphysical interpretation. For example, they suppose in the most traditional way that either the One is transmitted by language, or that the signifier cannot transmit it: in both cases, it is the thesis of language (here, the signifier) as logos, as constitutive of the essence or reality of the One, because we formally reject this Greek (and perhaps Judaic) thesis as to the essence of the One. Language only transmits the representations of the One, not the One or the Real itself which is the non-decisional and non-linguistic [langagière] immanence (of) oneself; but language is not incapable either of transmitting it, which is another metaphysical language. Through a congenital empiricism, philosophy believes that the One does not cease from being said in language, that language determines its essence or even fails to determine it. The ruin of this hallucinatory belief is the rock of non-analysis. The essence of man is human-vision-in-man and not divino-linguistic or theo-logical vision. Thus, we take the measure of what to engage here as resistance within the “conflict” of psychoanalysis and a science of men: the true Aufkläerer is us, we who affirm the radical intrinsic finitude of man-in-man rather than their “transfinitude” or their slitting as a “subject” through an unconscious or a first unintelligible signifier (the phallus). The “synthesis” of psychoanalysis and philosophy, the tripod of Being, Other and One as the One-of-Being and One-of-the-Other, is what there is of the most constant within thought in the philosophical mode. It is this Greco-Judaic legitimacy that we attempt to delimit in an utterly almost rigorous way. In the same way that metaphysics speaks (of) Being without interrogating itself on its essence, it now speaks, and more and more so, (of) the Other and (of) the One without further taking the time to elucidate the essence of these entities in it as purely functional and deposed.
The reprisal of the singular and split Greco-Judaic tradition that is a bit shakier or tangled up is therefore not the concern of non-analysis. Even as “supple” and “plastic” as they are, its contemporary forms that make it communicate with philosophy and even other knowledges, the situation that is targeted by analysis by lacking it is perhaps even a bit more complicated: there is not one disseminated donation, but two donations of man wherein one determines this dissemination. The problem is to articulate them. To retort through a psychoanalysis on the Joui-sans-jouissance or on the One-in-One as a fantasy or a mirage, a bit in the way of the famous “jouissance of the Other,” there is also nothing there but something strategically normal because we ourselves suggest to analysts that they are taken up in a transcendental illusion and an amphibology. Simply, we must see between analysis and non-analysis a real and no longer strategic difference: precisely in the way of treating…the Other; the way of receiving and loving man rather than the Other as first, and loving man as a Stranger rather than with these anonymous concepts like jouissance-energy and unconscious-signifier. This difference within the posture and reaction is a sign that hardly deceives, and it is what we must think about for the future of the theory of man.
Psychoanalysis as Restrained Analysis
Measured to this new position of the problem of the sciences of man, psychoanalysis could very well appear as the greatest failed attempt of one such science. Since it necessarily failed and failed in a sense not without reason, our problem is not to carry out its critique in favour of a competing analysis. Analysis will cry out with some reason that “man” has never been in its intention and that the man that it speaks of defines man in its own way under epistemological conditions, rather than letting itself be defined by man. No doubt, this is not in question. However, it is not for analysis alone to fix the criterion of the Real and if another thought fixes it, one that would be more radical than it, this other thought cannot not aim for it at least on the mode of avoidance; therefore, it is as though the Human Sciences appear as not having posed the question of their “real object” qua “real,” a transcendental question par excellence and, here, in a new and inalienable sense of the term. They have not perceived what would be necessary for a special science for the question of reality, namely the question of the essence of Jouissance, while philosophy is only the place for the question of possibility (even if it were also “real”). It is not shocking that philosophy and the Human Sciences, psychoanalysis included, program the dissolution of human reality in the possible and the violent exaltation of superhuman “possibilities” or in an absent and “impossible” real. There is a superior racism that passes through philosophy – mostly philosophy, for psychoanalysis here functions partially as a rampart – and it stands against man. There is no paradox in saying that the Human Sciences have not known man and let themselves be misled by Greek prejudices. They make man and science “vicious” or ready-made representations, abstracted each time from the reality of their processes, blending them prematurely without digging up the Radical Identity of the being-immanent that assures the indestructible reality of man, science and their connection. The Human Sciences are content with exploiting the reality of man to their benefit, without knowing it in accordance with the essence of man and properties through which it could impose itself as a scientific object. At best, they also correspond to an inflation of knowledges, to the abstraction of a certain theoretico-mathematical, combinatory and set-theoretical labour in the best of cases, and applied to some ready-made and assumed given representations of man, but which is only abstract because they are not related to man as to their real-of-the-last-instance. We make the complementary hypothesis that these sciences are neither really human nor scientific; that they are still massively philosophical transcendent auto-interpretations that ignore themselves as such at the same time as they ignore their condition of possibility is within the denegation of their object. The Human Sciences are metalanguages of man. They are content with a certain premature theoretical forming [mise en forme] of givens which are not really human but emerge from unitary attributes with which philosophy has always confounded man themselves: Power, Desire, Language, Knowledge, Labour, etc. They have not yet been able to give a theoretical explanation of the ensemble of human phenomena: at least they are not put in the posture which would allow us to give it, namely to unveil, in its type of original reality and its type of rigour, the new scientific continent. They could not nor have wanted to relate these phenomena to their real object, but, rather, have dissolved the real object within the multiplicity of local knowledges and vicious auto-interpretations. However, when they wanted to relate them to their object, it was always under the unitary-philosophical form of a transcendent man, reconstituted from the exterior with universal attributes, and opposite to this multiplicity as a unity of synthesis: a “man-horizon.” A humanist nostalgia haunts the soberest Human Sciences which despite everything dream of integration and recollection, when this dream is not a dream of totalization and hegemony – the dream of a “pilot-science.”
Psychoanalysis, whether it is redesigned in its foundations, conserves the same presupposeds as those since its birth. Psychoanalysis cannot nor want wanted to interrogate itself on the meaning of being (here reality), namely the mode of the phenomenal givenness of the Unconscious and Jouissance, but asks itself how – once the existence of both are admitted without further through their uncontrollable energetic effects or references, interpreting and conceptualizing them – can it make it into a scientific knowledge all by maintaining these presuppositions. Psychoanalysis presupposes their concept, namely their connection with man, and the concept of science that it fabricates as makeshift. For example, in Lacanian terms, psychoanalysis presumes that language and its combination structure the subject or, better yet, that the subject determines man, or that Jouissance is the neighbour of energy, theses that it receives from a dubious history often under the empiricist pretext of the “clinic.” The problem of the intrinsic reality of the Unconscious means: to what extent the Unconscious and its logico-combinatory or even set-theoretical structures – they function, this is not the question – are they related to the specific reality of man and how do the analysts know them? The response to these questions is wrongly assumed as sufficiently grounded by the simple clinical recording and treatment of effectivity (no doubt specific) of certain phenomena having common characters that one identifies like those of the unconscious and its effects. However, this problem of the content of reality of the unconscious (and jouissance moreover) is absolutely not ruled when one has admitted the specificity of these phenomena undoubtedly not in simple opposition to the old “conscience” or to Being but as that which neither is nor is not – as that which is absent. Whether it be conscious and the unconscious, the Other as the One-of-the-heterogeneous and beyond as lack, if it represents a superseding of “negative magnitudes,” is always assumed arbitrarily and connected (with the subject on the one hand and jouissance on the other hand) to a “human” of pure convenience. Obviously, we cannot deduce the unconscious from the conscious, nor make a genealogy of it through the conscious such that philosophy (for example idealist philosophy) has elaborated the structure of. This represents a specific discovery whose practice and clinic demonstrate originality and irreducibility; but the problem of the human reality of jouissance and the unconscious (which is precisely no longer the philosophical problem of possibility or the possibilization, even the impossibility, of the Real) is not resolved by the clinic nor, theoretically, through the call to a “decision” that is other than the philosophical and the Greek, a decision that is, for example, of the Judaic type, nor through an experience of loss and lack advanced that, without which, its relation to the Real and, without which, the Real itself, of course would be pursued even in its ultimate retrenchments. Therefore, this is not a surplus-philosophical objection [objection philosophique de plus] that we make towards psychoanalysis for we could say the same thing about philosophy: like psychoanalysis, philosophy always gives itself human reality and reality tout court arbitrarily and in a utilitarian fashion. Both psychoanalysis and philosophy assume human reality given on the mode of auto-positional exteriority and transcendence and, by this very fact, the donation that they carry out exempts itself from the given and adds itself to it, completing the scrambling of the identity of the Real. One gives the identity of the Real on the mode of Being and its fetishes (cosmos, physis, polis, reason, conscience, language, the inconsistent multiple, etc.), the other gives the Real on the mode of the trial of the Other received by external traditions which cannot be the equivalent to one thought and even less to a science. The human object cannot be postulated from the exterior by one discipline that relates itself to it even if were as a simple “subject”; nor can it be technologically constituted by heteroclite pieces and morsels from harvesting, abstraction, analogy and transference. It must be given with and for the science where it is the specific object at the same time that it is first – but this trait exceeds the science of man – the unobjectivatable cause (of) this science. The point is not to negate the unconscious but to make the unconscious the concept adequate to this inalienable, incontestable essence of man.
What is the specific real that analysis recognizes as the unconscious if it is not man themselves as One-in-One? It is the Other, therefore inevitably as the first or the self-positional even in its essence as lack or absence. Therefore, it is more profoundly still the One of the heteros, the One proximal to exteriority and blamed with transcendence. It is not the One-as-Other that would still be Greco-metaphysical, but the Other-as-One, the signifier and its unary trait which marks it with heterogeneity, for if the One is the Other, it is on condition that the Other would also and especially be Other-than-Being; but this Other-than-Being is not nothing, it acts in Being itself, it is the One insofar as it is withdrawn, absented or lacking in Being. Psychoanalysis, pulled back by its quasi-Judaic trial, is an experience of the Other beyond Being and non-Being, but is this response worth better than the philosophical response that says that we have only have experience of the One-that-is – even when it says “it is not”? In any case, the One is abstract and dependent on Being on one title or another. Therefore, there will be no experience or autonomous thought of the One, but it must be associated to an always transcendent support or situation, sometimes Being, sometimes the Other (which is not). These analytico-philosophical arguments at most admit the constancy of the One, its necessary but unelucidated presence at the foundation of any thought; for what remains, they sink themselves into a radicalized Greco-Judaic aporia or antinomy wherein one science of man should precisely get out of. For is the secret of this One so unanimously invoked any other thing than man? Is it man who is here split in jouissance and in the subject?
The reasons of the impossible presence of the One in the arrangements with Being or the Other therefore do not hold for Greco-metaphysical reasons, for the historiality of an “envoy” in relation to which we will be the late, “missing” and irresponsible inheritors, but more simply by this fact of all facts that the One-qua-One, the heart of Jouissance, is the Real itself, the absolutely given, not the supposed given; the One-qua-One is what is independent of any philosophical ontology or donation but which cannot be thought independently of them. Neither ontology nor psychoanalysis can assure us of the Real – as it happens man – which they rather have the task to repress by dividing it. The One is the instance required by both of them each time on heterogeneous modes, perhaps irreconcilable, if this is not within their common foreclosure of the Real. We must elaborate a new theory – non-analysis precisely – to think that which is no longer an analogy nor a univocity: the very theory of a science which finds “before it,” to inscribe them within a universal space, as henceforth contingent data, philosophy and psychoanalysis with their multiple uses of the One.
Measured to the One-in-One that it believes despite everything to aim for and that it can only aim for through the prism of the Other – this is the unary trait – psychoanalysis bears the same stigmata of decisive arbitration as philosophy: the One or the Real is enslaved by transcendence having become radical, functionally requisitioned for the secondary tasks of the dispersion of the signifier after having been the unity-of-contraries for the secondary tasks of philosophy. Instead of being ordered by a synthesis, by an Other-under-identity, the One or the Real is now ordered by an Other-without-identity; it is no longer identitarian, but it is still unitary, being submitted to an instance other than itself, communicating its reality with that which has no reality or which uses a reality of a secondary type and one other than its own. Instead of serving Being, the Real now serves Difference, shifting, delaying, and lapsus as the syntax of the unconscious. From this perspective, the latent Judaism since Freud will have fortunately renewed the affects and forms of philosophy without however destroying the philosophical decision itself, combining itself rather with it according to improbable modes at the limits of coherence. This struggle is only interesting, it is not scientific and does not have the importance that it imagines for a science of men. There is a struggle precisely because the adversaries place themselves outside of the Real itself and within representation, even when they fight over the One and the Other after having fought around Being. Therefore, the authentic Real, the One, is rejected as “impossible.” The Real, if it is specified as man, cannot obviously be the “impossible.” The impossible is at best the transcendent real such that it is delimited by philosophy for example. For the science of men, the Real is immanent and the cause-of-the-last-instance, and it is the possible or the signifier and the unconscious that is unreal, which does not mean that it would be nothing. Indeed, the One-qua-One, as identity (of) the Joui which is known non-positionally and non-donatively itself, is that which gives its little reality, but its phenomenal reality of-the-last-instance, to the Other (insofar as it is not) as much as to Being (insofar as it turns towards fantasy and the unlimited appearance) and finally to the Unconscious. It is with the means that its radical immanence can furnish that we must describe its specific reality and the effects of this reality on the philosophical and analytic imaginary.
The idealist triad analyzed above has analytic avatars: the imaginary triad (mother/child/phallus); the symbolic triad; need, demand, desire, etc. The whole recent critique of psychoanalysis (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, and Henry) have denounced them but by being content most often with differentiating or increasing them – it remains a “critique.” This critique must be done in a more immanent way through a re-elaboration of the essence of the Unconscious which, instead of being posed as first, cannot not henceforth have man as cause, of course as cause “of-the-last-instance.” Psychoanalysis and philosophy never end their conflict but join hands finally against the science of humans. The procedure of the triad that triumphs in philosophy and in psychoanalysis is the means of this resistance and it is what must be globally suspended in the elucidation in the theory of the Unconscious. This theory no longer passes through a foundation of the philosophical type nor through a deconstruction of this foundation. The “Human Sciences/philosophy” problem is certainly not what we oppose to the analysts. We substitute the traditional line of demarcation that brings philosophy and man as the subject of the Cartesian type together to oppose them against science and analysis with another one, a line of demarcation that puts man on the side of the Real or the Cause, and we distinguish them together from philosophy and psychoanalysis within their spontaneous exercise.
We must dare to make this hypothesis: it saves man from their so-called scientific “objectivation” and their subjugation to the unconscious which is only in reality an effect of the spontaneous idealism of philosophy but does not belong to the essence of the unified theory nor are tolerable by the essence of man as the distinction between the philosophical auto-objectivation and the non-positional objectivity (of) oneself of Strangers demonstrates in general. Man is only the object of one science – as Universal Humanity or Strangers – if man is first their cause-as-Ego-of-the-last-instance, which has never itself had the form of objectivation and more generally the form of position. It is on this basis of man as Ego-without-subject that they can also be the “object,” namely the now non-positional objectivity (of) oneself – undoubtedly the real content of the Unconscious. The primitive, absolutely originary unity that is not decided by philosophy or analysis but determined by man, the unity of man (and) analysis is the absolute soil for any non-analytic thought. Analysis or that which it becomes then ceases being a simple possibility of the Philosophical Decision (of Being, Logos, and Reason) with a close variation as the philosophies would love to believe, it can no longer be turned against man from which it holds its reality. Analysis finally ceases from being this alienation, this dogmatic thought that the philosophers cannot not want secretly regardless. This approach requires the abandonment of the epistemological procedure: instead of giving oneself an Idea or a Fact of the sciences and in particular of psychoanalysis and already posed through philosophical transcendence, to then ask oneself how to describe and ground them and thus pass from fact to law, we let-the-Real-or-the-Joui-be-given immediately as Given-without-Givenness (neither fact nor law) and it is on this basis that we elaborate the knowledge of humans as they are – as Strangers, under the entirely “occasional” condition of psychoanalytic material.
The analysts will object: the “radical” or the “Real” is either a metaphysical fantasy or an impossibility, but this is not because philosophy and psychoanalysis are constructed to repress it or made to resist it, or simply to test it as inaccessible or impossible, that the radical is unfindable. Precisely, it is because man as index sui has already found in themselves as themselves or as the inalienable Ego – the vision-in-Ego. “Radical” does not mean another thing than inalienable or “of-the-last-instance”: it is a non-Cartesian Ego that is not accessible to an analytic critique like the Cartesian Ego.
The question of the reality of one science and its relation to its “real object” is not extrinsic as philosophy wants or hesitant and indirect as psychoanalysis wants. This is a question to which a unified theory, making use of analysis, when at least an idealist or positivist philosopher is not there to dissolve its reality, responds immanently rather than metaphysically or through a call towards an extrinsic or devaluing ontological foundation. Analysis as it is “saved” in a unified theory is not submitted more to the Other as to Being: it is transcendental in a new sense and finds in this context or element towards thinking and governing itself.
Non-Analysis is a generalized psychoanalysis under the conditions of the radically immanent Ego, such that it determines the Unconscious. It is distinguished from a psychoanalysis simply broadened by philosophy and which will seem to us on this point neither more nor less valid – on the plane of principles and rigour – than one of these mixtures that we combat against. It falls into the more-or-less [à-peu-près] and the concepts of the communicational which are theoretically unverifiable (“instinct,” “interest,” “interesting,” “dialogue,” and the “network” between the philosophical and analytic, etc.). Thus, we describe the condition of human and technical sensibility of an analytic practice which only asks to be expanded, in no way its “de jure” relation to its object, and to what object (the in?human unconscious or man-as-unconscious?), which is a wholly other question. Metaphysical skepticism will grin at this type of questions that it will call…metaphysical; psychoanalysis will see this type of questions as the work of desire; and intellectual vulgarity will believe to solve the problem by speaking of “theoreticism.” Nevertheless, it is through this type of problems that we intend to distinguish ourselves from the interminable conflict of analysis and philosophy and revive the essence (in a new sense: the theoretical use) of psychoanalysis against all of the metaphysical dissolvents with which the contemporaries wash the dead all over man.
Therefore, the problem is not to make philosophy and psychoanalysis “communicate” in a transfinite network, to begin once more a mixture between the Greek and Jew which is decidedly the new philosophical common sense (analysis as the Other of philosophy…). Rather, it is to put them back in their place defined by the Ego-in-Ego and the Stranger. Of course, the Ego, the cause of the Identity of man and analysis, is inevitable to pose them “in advance.” Here, the analysts are tempted to denounce a philosophical habitus. They forget that even the “Other,” even the “signifier,” the “detour” or the “unexpected,” etc., are posed in advance and even autoposed qua first “structure,” even if it were at the same time deprived of the real. But the point is to go further: we will no longer be made to believe in an empiricism ex nihilo, we will no longer unitarily confound the thing and the effect of the thing, for example, man and the fact that man speaks, or the real and the effects of the real, truth and the effects of truth. There is a positivism of the signifier, the effect, the indirect, the detour and the return, the interval, difference, the pure multiple; a positivism and a dogmatism of the Other or the unconscious – badly corrected by the Freudian idea of auto-perception of the id and drives – which has replaced in the contemporaries the metaphysical positivism of the attribute and predicate that responds to the same unitary ideal – simply displaced – of the confusion of man and a universal and transcendent instance or authority [instance]. This amphibology of the unconscious and an auto-positional transcendence is that which a human science should precisely suspend.
Man is not more submitted to the Other than to Being, to the signifying gap or to difference than to metaphysical or logocentric identity. Man determines their unconscious in-the-last-instance alone. The analysts are tempted with asking about what we have advanced as being the essence of man: how does he know this in advance…? It would be easy to give them the same ball: they know in advance, undoubtedly they have learned from the Old Testament, that man is prey to the Other. If there is always something of the advance (something a priori? Something presupposed? Something of the tradition? Some philosophical theses or even “first terms” or “axioms”?), the problem is therefore rather to pose the least possible “advance” but the most radical advance, finding the “given in advance” whose being-given is not determined by its being-in-advance, a first-given-without-primacy. It seemed to us that it was the One as Given-without-givenness rather than the Other or rather than Being; the human multiple of Strangers rather than the multiple of Being or the signifier. This prior recognition, and it alone, which is no longer a philosophical presupposition but the order of a transcendental or “real” axiomatic founds a directly human science, namely the only one “in the game” that is a bit new and serious that is worth the trouble that we glance at anew on the side of psychoanalysis but from afar.
The unified theory that we speak of that can give analysis a human use is distinguished as much from the “science of Being” (from metaphysics to philosophy-as-rigorous-science) as the One-in-One is distinguished from Being and as, consequently, the Stranger is distinguished from “the subject of the unconscious.” The science of Being is a true metaphysics and analysis is a problematic science that cannot do without philosophy. We aim well and definitively for an “empirical” (but not empiricist) theory of man, which possesses a “science” side but that is related transcendentally to the real of man. We do not deny that analysis entails another thing than principles – for example local sequences of the knowledge (of) the Real, even the very fragments of the Real – but this is only given, as a hypothesis of the Given-without-givenness, in-the-last-instance rather than at the end of a detour or in the “mi-lieu” of the detour, through fragments or as the impasse of the unconscious. Even anteriorly to the possibilization or “impossibilization” of psychoanalysis, there is not its realization but its reality, its content in humanity. The problem is not only indeed of the labour of the scientific type done to these sequences of knowledge. Non-Analysis begins when one asks themselves how the partial objects of the body and the unconscious knowledge are related to real objects and finally to a Real which is not impossible. Therefore, it seems to us as “lightly and quite frankly metaphysical” to not pose under its radical form (the unified theory is the response to this question which, as a response, precedes this question) the question: why is there something of analysis rather than nothing? Or rather than only something of philosophy? Better yet, what real use can be made of analysis since of analysis there is a use but that we do not know if it is human? The positivism that awaits such forgetting is not discarded by the analytic care to make the One speak as Other.
With the theory proposed on the basis of the One as Joui, we will say all that follows to prevent a misunderstanding does not negate the traces of the “real,” the leaps or events on which analysis grounds itself, and furthermore not the “real” that is the hole or the lack, the partialization of the “real” and “symbolic.” Rather, the theory responds to a question forgotten by philosophy and psychoanalysis: they who speak and unceasingly use the One as the trait of totality or as the trait of unicity of the signifier, who know that it is the trace and the partial that make up the singularity and remake unity, where do they get this One that they cannot not speak of and use? For, despite what they say, they also give themselves the One at the same time (this is the problem) as Being and the Other – they give themselves everything at once… They take their One from traditions – the Bible and the Presocratics – but this is not a discovery. It is just a belief and a rumour; an uncreative, uninteresting response because it is authoritarian, a response through transcendence rather than an immanent and scientific hypothesis. It is not as a reader but as the cause (of) science that man “receives” themselves or lets-themselves-be-given-(to)-themselves as Joui-of-the-last-instance. Besides that, nothing allows one to think that biblical and Jewish language would be more open to the truth than philosophical and Greek language: both presume given the One and Being, the One as One-of-Being. They simply give a lot to make sure it is “real” but what they give each other exceeds the Given-without-givenness and is only the assumed real. To the contrary, the thing itself that non-analysis postulates in the hypothesis and axioms of the Joui and the Unconscious, their “dual” and “unilateral” distinction, can only first be the Real-outside-presence, outside-intuition, the One-without-Being, even if thought or the hypothesis-form gives it (back) or donates the already-Given. By defect of these distinctions, the Real no longer radically precedes [précè] representation or is once and for all and at best solely the “impossible” of representation. Once more, a vicious circle rather than a rigorous explanation through induction and deduction.
One of the founding appearances of philosophy is believing that Being can give, or the Multiple can refuse, its reality to the One, or the Other to divide it, as if this unreal buttress, this transcendent support could be the equivalent of an intrinsic reality. This belief obviously has a vicious form since the One must then give its reality or its essence and that, repressed by the Multiple, it continutes to condition it or that it is necessary as trait, but to assure the multiple of the signifier. It is to these feats worthy of Baron Munchausen that philosophy and psychoanalysis are suspended, for lack of a specific elucidation of the essence of the One and its (non-)relation to Being. This is to say that to pose the equivalence or the communication of the One, Being and the Other, or, to the contrary, to pose their incompatibility does not advance the problem an inch such that the thought of the One is not enlightened and is content with recording what the double Greco-Judaic tradition willingly authoritatively concede to it. The very contemporary art of “putting into relation” or “putting in a network,” of generalized communication, the bricolage of extracted pieces from the oldest machines of humanity, can certainly pass for philosophy – because it does – but not for another thing. How would the One not have, by way of ultimate content, non-decisional Jouissance (of) oneself, the Joui itself rather than Jouissance, if it must also be gnawed to veins by the Other?
“Ordinary man” or the Stranger means among other things that they do not have to be “informed” or “wise” to know that the One excludes division or that they “enjoy” non-donatively and non-positionally (of) themselves. Even less, in any case, they do not need to know that division and indivision communicate, which is a necessarily more complex and more derived thesis. It is enough to admit – every man is confounded with this premise – the minimum of the real given and not simply assumed given at the end of a transcendence to be able to take immanence of the nothing-but-One, the Joui-of-the-last-instance, as a guiding thread. By contrast, one must have read Parmenides and the Bible – one must have already viciously posed communication in itself – to believe that division and indivision, Being and One, Other and One communicate. Decidedly, no agreement will ever be possible between the thinkers who exercise the human liberty of thought and those who postulate the authority of texts.
It is not good and, in any case, ineffective to want to hide this hiatus through the galloping ideology of dialogue and communication. That everything communicates, and everything communicates with a nearby Other, is a triviality, a quasi-tautology, and a narcissism. Communication merits being thought when something – it is found that this can only be the being of man – not only refuses to communicate but has never entered into the vicious circle of universal communication. In the same way it is not because the One is said in several ways that these ways belong or determine it: this belief is also philosophy, but this is but one belief and a rumour. A “thought of the One” like non-analysis only has interest if it can finally interrupt, at least on behalf of thought, these circular reasonings through which the philosophers and the analysts claim to make themselves the masters of the real itself through “communication” and, as the authority of old texts in hand, pronounce exclusion against every attempt to think otherwise than as the Greeks and the Jews together.
en-demic 