Furrows in the alethosphere 5

From The Other Side of Psychoanalysis

By Jacques Lacan

In a certain sense, this is only a local articulation. It certainly does not pretend to
solve, with a fixed and guaranteed proportion, the question of the effectiveness of the
most primary manifestation of number, namely the unary trait. I only did it to remind
you what science is such as we have it now, if I can put it like this, on our handsI
mean, present in our world in a manner that goes well beyond anything that an effect
of knowledge may lead us to speculate about.

In effect, it is, all the same, necessary not to forget that it is characteristic of our
science not to have introduced a better and more extensive knowledge of the world
but to have brought into existence, in the world, things that did not in any way exist at
the level of our perception.

Attempts have been made to organize science according to some mythical genesis that
begins with perception, under the pretext that such and such a philosophical
meditation had supposedly come to a standstill for a long time over the question of
knowing what guarantees that perception is not illusory. This is not where science
emerged from. Science emerged from what was embryonic in the Euclidean
demonstrations. Nevertheless, these still remain very suspect because they still
contain that attachment to the figure, the self-evidence of which serves as a pretext.
The entire evolution of Greek mathematics proves to us that what rises to the highest
point is the manipulation of numbers as such.

Consider the method of exhaustion which, already in Archimedes, prefigures what

leads to what is essential, to what for us is, as it happens, structure, namely the
calculus, the infinitesimal calculus. There is no need to wait until Leibziz, who,
moreover, at his first attempt shows himself to have been a little awkward. It had
already been started by Cavalieri, simply by reproducing Archimedes exploit on the
parabola, in the seventeenth century, but well before Leibniz.

What is the result of this? No doubt you can say of science that nihil fuerit in
intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu, what does that prove? The sensus has nothing
to do, as people nevertheless know, with perception. The sensus is only there in the
manner of what can be counted, and the actual counting rapidly dissolves. Taking
what is in our sensus at the level of the ear or eye, for example, leads to counting
vibrations. And it was owing to this play of numbers that we in fact set about
producing vibrations that had nothing to do either with our senses or with our
perception.

nihil fuerit in
intellectu quod non prius fuit in sensu,
sensu

As I was saying the other day on the steps of the pantheon, the world that is assumed
to have always ours is now populated, in the very place where we are, without your
having the slightest suspicion of it, by a considerable and intersecting number of what

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are called waves. This is not to be neglected as the manifestation, presence,
existence, of science, and to describe what is around our Earth would require that one
not be satisfied with speaking of atmosphere, of stratosphere, of whatever you would
like to spherize, however distant the particles we can apprehend. It would be
necessary to account also of what in our day goes well beyond, and which is the effect
of what? Of a knowledge that has progressed less through its own filtering, through its
own critique as we say, than through an audacious leap from an artifice, no doubt that
of Descartesothers will choose different onesthe artifice of giving the guarantee
of truth back to God. If truth there be, that he take responsibility for it. We take it at
face value.

Solely by means of the play of a truth that is not abstract but purely logical, solely by
the play of a strict combinatory that is subject only to the requirement that rules, under
the name of axioms, must always be giventhis is where a science is constructed,
one that no longer has anything to do with the presuppositions that the idea of
knowledge has always impliednamely, the mute polarization, the imagined ideal
unification of that is knowledge, where one can always find, whatever the name one
dresses them up, in endosunia, for instance, the reflection, the image, which is
moreover always ambiguous, of two principles, the male principle and the female
principle.

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The space in which the creations of science are deployed can only be qualified
henceforth as the in-substance, as the a-thing, with an apostrophea fact that entirely
changes the meaning of our materialism.

It is the oldest figure of the masters infatuationwrite master as you willfor

man to image that he shapes woman, I think you all have experienced enough to have
encountered this comical story at one stage of your life or another. Form, substance,
content, call it what you willthis is the myth scientific thought must detach itself
from.

I figure that I am allowed to plow on fairly crudely in order to express my thought

well. I am failing to act as if I had had a thought, whereas, precisely, this is not the
case, but, as everyone knows, its thought that communicates itself, by means of
misunderstanding, of course. Well, lets communicate and say what this conversion
consists in, the conversion by which science is shown to be distinct from any theory
of knowledge.

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