Louis Althusser (19181990)

Closely associated with the period of high structuralism in 1960s France, Louis Althusser was one of the most significant Marxist philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Birmendreis, Algeria in 1918, he moved to France with his family in 1930 and shortly thereafter pursued his lyce studies in Lyon. In 1939, he was admitted to the cole Normale Suprieure, but his education was deferred when he was called up for military service. He spent the majority of the war in a German prisoner of war camp, a period that was formative for his own sense of political solidarity and his nascent Communist sympathies. In 1948, he passed the agrgation exam and also joined the French Communist Party, thus officially launching his dual career as a teacher of philosophy and an engaged Party intellectual. For more than thirty years, Althusser served as the agrg-rptiteur, or caman, at the ENS, the instructor charged with preparing students for the agrgation. This institutional base meant that scores of post-war French philosophers and intellectuals were exposed to and influenced by his teaching. For many years, Althusser suffered from periodic bouts of manic-depressive illness that interrupted his work and which tragically resulted in the strangling of his wife in 1980. Althusser spent the remaining decade of his life in and out of hospitals before his death in 1990. Althussers decisive influence on the editors of the Cahiers was a result of his philosophical intervention in Marxism over the course of the 1960s. Beginning with his article On the Young Marx (1961), Althusser produced a series of critical essays which responded to the ongoing work of deStalinization with a refusal to return to the Hegelian humanism of Marxs youth and a radical insistence on the scientific quality of Marxs work in Capital, as opposed to all forms of ideological mystification. Central to Althussers project was the claim that an epistemological break separated the young from the mature Marx, a break which correlated to the distinction between ideology and science. Moreover, Althussers critique of the Hegelian elements of Marxism specifically targeted the concept of expressive causality that lay at the centre of a teleological model of history driven by an effectively absolute subject (the proletariat). Against this framework, Althusser developed a theory of structural causality and argued for a conception of a history as a process without asubject. Inspired by Lacans return to Freud, Althusser conceived of his return to Marx in similar terms, attempting to supplant a substantive theory of (class) consciousness with a structural theory of determinant relations. After the publication in 1965 of For Marx, a collection of his articles, and Reading Capital, the results of his seminar on Marxs masterpiece, Althusser began a more sustained inquiry into the nature of discourse and the conceptual relations among philosophy, science, and ideology. These investigations were undertaken in collaboration with his current and former students, among which figured Alain Badiou and Yves Duroux and other contributors to the Cahiers. He published in the Cahiers the text of one of his lessons on Rousseau,a lesson which displayed the fecundity of Althussers method of symptomatic reading. Althussers later work would be marked by a series of auto-critiques and suggestive, if under-developed avenues for further research. In many ways, however, the Cahiers can be read as the critical development of Althussers own intellectual itinerary when it was at its most robust. As such, they are a lasting testament to the lines of inquiry opened by his work and his teaching.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

Louis Althusser, Sur le Contrat Social (Les dcalages), CpA 8.1

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Journal de captivit (Stalag XA 1940-45). Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992. Linternationale des bons sentiments (1946). In Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I. Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994. The International of Decent Feelings, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997. Du contenu dans la pense de G.W.F. Hegel (1947). In Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I. Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994. On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings.London: Verso, 1997. Le retour Hegel. Dernier mot du rvisionisme universitaire (1950). La Nouvelle Critique 20 (1950). The Return of Hegel: The Latest Word in Academic Revisionism, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997. propos du marxisme (1953). Revue de lenseignement philosophique. 3:4 (1953): 15-19. On Marxism, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997. Note sur le matrialisme dialectique (1953). Revue de lenseignement philosophique, 3:5 (1953): 11-17. On Marxism, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997. Montesquieu, la politique et lhistoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. Montesquieu: Politics and History, trans. Ben Brewster, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx. London: Verso, 2007. Les Manifestes philosophiqes de Feuerbach, La Nouvelle Critique 121 (1960): 32-38. Feuerbachs Philosophical Manifestoes, trans. Ben Brewster, For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969. Sur le jeune Marx (Questions de thorie), La Pense 96 (1961): 3-26. On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions, trans. Ben Brewster, For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969.

Contradiction et surdetermination (Notes pour un recherche), La Pense 106 (1962): 5-46. Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an Investigation, trans. Ben Brewster,For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969. Marxisme et humanisme. Cahiers de lInstitut des Sciences conomique Appliques 20 (1964): 109-133. Marxism and Humanism, trans. Ben Brewster in For Marx. London New Left Books, 1969. Sur la dialectique matrialiste (De lingalit des origines). La Pense 110 (1963): 5-46. On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Origins, trans. Ben Brewster, For Marx.London: Verso 2005. Freud et Lacan. La Nouvelle Critique 161-162 (19641965): 88-108. Freud and Lacan, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review, 2002. Lire le Capital, Tome 1 and 2, with tienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancire. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (contributions of Establet, Macherey, and Rancire omitted). London: New Left Books, 1970 . Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation (1965), trans. James Kavanaugh, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. Sur Lvi-Strauss (1966). In crits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997. On Lvi-Strauss, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003. Conjuncture philosophique et recherche thorique marxiste(1966). In crits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997. The Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003. Trois notes sur la thorie du discours(1966). In Ecrits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993. Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003. Philosophie et philosophie spontane des savants (1967), Paris: Maspero, 1974. Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists trans. Warren Montag, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. Du ct de la philosophie (Cinquime cours de philosophie pour scientifiques) (1967). In crits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997. La tche historique de la philosophie marxiste (1967). The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003. Lenine et la Philosophie, Bulletin de la Socit de Philosophie 4 (1968): 127-181; Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002. Sur le rapport de Marx Hegel. In Hegel et la pense moderne, ed. Jacques lHondt. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970. Marxs Relation to Hegel, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002. Ideologie et appareils idologiques dtat (notes pour une recherche) La Pense 151 (1970): 3-38. Ideology and Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002. lements dautocritique. Paris: Hachette 1974. Elements of Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock, Essays in Self-Criticism. London: New Left Books, 1976. Est-il simple dtre marxiste en philosophie? (Soutenance dAmiens) La Pense 183 (1975): 3-31. Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy? trans. Grahame Lock, Essays in Self-Criticism.London: New Left Books, London, 1976. 2me Congrs. Paris: Maspero, 1977. On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Review 104 (1977): 3-22. La transformation de la philosophie (1976), Sur la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. The Transformation of Philosophy trans., Thomas E. Lewis, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. Enfin la crise du marxisme!In Pouvoir et opposition dans les socits post-rvolutionnaires. Paris: Seuil, 1978. Solitude de Machiavel(1977). In Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Machiavellis Solitude, trans. Gregory Elliott. Machiavelli and Us. London: Verso, 1999. Marx dans ses limites(1978). In crits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 1. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994. Le Marxisme aujourdhui 1978). In Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. Marxism Today, trans. James H. Kavanaugh, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. Le courant souterrain du matrialisme de la rencontre(1982). In crits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 1. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994. The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978-1987. London: Verso, 2006.. Lavenir dure longtemps(1985). In Lavenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les Faits. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992. The Future Lasts Forever, trans. Richard Veasey. New York: New Press, 1993.

Claude Lvi-Strauss (19082009)

Hailed as the father of modern anthropology at the time of his death at age 100 in 2009, Claude Lvi-Strauss was a pivotal figure in the development of twentieth-century Frenchstructuralism. After pursuing initial studies at the Sorbonne in law and philosophy, Lvi-Strauss took a teaching post at the University of Sao Paulo in 1935, which also afforded him the experience of ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. He returned to France in 1939 at the outbreak of hostilities, but escaped to North America soon after the French capitulation in 1940. While in New York, he became close to the anthropologist Franz Boas and the linguist Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom would leave an indelible mark on Lvi-Strausss intellectual development. Following upon the success of his memoir and travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lvi-Strauss returned to the themes first sketched in his Elementary Forms of Kinship (1949) with an even more rigorous application of Saussurean structural linguistics to the field of anthropology. In Structural Anthropology (1958) and The Savage Mind (1962), Lvi-Strauss showed how cultural forms could be scientifically studied in terms of universal laws of binary relation and differentiation. The latter work concluded with a polemical critique of Jean-Paul Sartres dialectical account of history that, in the eyes of many, signalled the eclipse of an existentialism of historical praxis by a new structuralism of universal symbolic forms. Lvi-Strauss was elected to the Collge de France in 1959 and from there exercised a wide influence on French intellectual life throughout the 1960s. Jacques Lacan expressed his debts to Lvi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser too developed his own structuralist Marxism in a manner at once indebted to, and ultimately critical of the Lvi-Straussian model that was its own condition. Volume five of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse is devoted to the resurgence of the Rousseauist paradigm in Lvi-Strausss project and contains Jacques Derridas influential critique of Lvi-Strauss, a piece which that would find wider dissemination due to its inclusion in Derridas Of Grammatology (1967). Lvi-Strauss responded to Derridas critique in a letter to the Cercle dpistmologie, wherein he noted Derridas handling of the logical law of the excluded middle with the delicacy of a bear. The letter is printed in volume eight of the Cahiers, devoted to the unthought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

Jacques Derrida, Avertissement, CpA 4.Introduction Jacques Derrida, Nature, Culture, Ecriture (de Lvi-Strauss Rousseau), CpA 4.1 Jean Mosconi, Sur la thorie du devenir de lentendement, CpA 4.2 Claude Lvi-Strauss, Une lettre propos de Lvi-Strauss dans le dix-huitime sicle, CpA 8.5

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Les Structures lmentaires de la parent. Paris: PUF, 1949. The Elementary Forms of Kinship, trans. J.H. Bell, J.R. von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. A World on the Wane, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. London: Hutchinson 1961. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books,1963. La Pense sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962. The Savage Mind, trans. Rodney Needham. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966. Mythologiques I-IV: Le Cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon, 1964, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969 Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon, 1966, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 LOrigine des manires de table. Paris: Plon, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978 LHomme nu. Paris: Plon, 1971, The Naked Man, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Myth and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Structure La structure
In the first essay in Volume 1 of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, Jacques Lacan notes how structuralism is beginning to transform the human sciences. One of the guiding aims of theCahiers was to analyse the place of subjectivity within the structures uncovered by logic, mathematics, linguistics and the social sciences. See also:

Linguistics, Structural Causality, Unconscious In a 1945 article on Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, the German neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer wrote that Structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that, in these last decades, has become more and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research.1 Two decades later, the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur gave a provocative though apt distillation of structuralist philosophy when he described the absolute formalism of Claude Lvi-Strausss anthropology as Kantianism without a transcendental subject.2 Indeed, stated most generally, structuralism was a theoretical movement which sought to determine and describe the structures of given phenomena (cultural, natural, or otherwise) without recourse to agents or entities extrinsic to these phenomena. The perspective of structuralism was immanent, as opposed to transcendent. In any given system, structures were not set in motion or manipulated by external agents; rather, structure ought to be read as the site of agency itself. Though Ferdinand de Saussure rarely used the term structure, it was the posthumous publication of his Cours de linguistique gnrale in 1916 that laid the groundwork for the development of twentieth-century structuralism. Breaking with a tradition of comparative linguistics that emphasized the diachronic development of languages in historical time, Saussure called for a synchronic analysis that took a given language as a unity to be analysed in terms of its component parts and internal relations. Two distinctions were crucial to Saussures approach: that between langue (language) and parole (speech) and that between the signifiant (signifier) and the signifi (signified).3 The signifier and the signified are the composite elements of the linguistic sign, itself the basic unit of language. According to Saussure, the diachronic movement of spoken parole is crucially grounded in the synchronic structures of langue. For this reason, it is the structure of langue that must serve as the site of linguistic analysis rather than the derivative phenomenon of diachronic speech, orparole.4 Any given langue or language is made up of a set of linguistic units, or signs, that are to be distinguished from their referents in the external world (e.g., in any given instance, the sign tree may be used to refer to the green and brown mass jutting up from the ground in the distance). But the sign is itself split. The split is between the signifier (i.e., the word, or sound-image, tree) and what is signified (i.e., the concept tree). It was Saussures fundamental contention that the relation of signifier to signified was essentially arbitrary; there is no natural connection between the sound tree and the concept signified by this particular aural configuration. Rather, the denotative function of signs is a result of the differences between signifiers, on the one hand, and the differences between signifieds on the other. In language there are only differences [...]. A difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.5 The correlation of a given signifier to a certain signified is a result of the differences of the unique signifier from all others (tree, rather than three, or tee, etc.), and the consistent application, within the synchronic system of language, of this unique signifier to the set of features that distinguish the concept tree. At its heart, the Saussurean conception of language is anti-representationalist. Language is no longer conceived as a system of signs which correlates with some anterior reality independent of these signs. Rather, language itself is now understood as a structure which produces rather than reveals meaning. It was this element of Saussures thinking that would be most profoundly developed in the structural anthropology of Claude Lvi-Strauss. In a series of groundbreaking works, Lvi-Strauss expanded the narrowly linguistic conception of structure as the site of meaning in language in order to develop a structural account of the production of meaning tout court. Two related themes were especially central to Lvi-Strausss research: the relation between nature and culture, and the universality of myth. For Lvi-Strauss, the universal manifestation of the incest prohibition in various human cultures was the perfect example of how an essentially cultural phenomenon could acquire a natural force. The natural weight of the incest prohibition was itself tied up in a network of signs which determined familial relations in the first place, a cultural network that was prior to any biological grasp of kinship relations in the modern, scientific sense. Lvi-Strauss read the structure of kinship relations in the circulation of women as units uniting and dispersing families. To be sure, a woman is much more than a signifier. But the signal insight of Lvi-Strausss thinking was to show how chains of signification determine much that is deemed natural in the world, including human freedom itself. The quest for deep structures subtending the apparent arbitrariness of cultures and existence was a guiding concern of Lvi-Strausss research into myth. In his book The Raw and the Cooked (1964), he sought to draw up an inventory of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty.6 In a widely read critique of Sartres Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Lvi-Strauss argued that truth was not a function of the historically-mediated subject but depended on a reconstruction of the effectively atemporal and unconscious ordering or classifying processes that regulate knowledge and experience.7 This emphasis on structure, as a site of logical or quasi-logical necessity anterior to apparent historical or subjective contingency, was a common theme in post-war French structuralism. To rethink a concept of subjectivity that might be consistent with a concept of structure as that which is at once determinant and rule-bound, or governed by necessity, became a fundamental aim of the editors of the Cahiers. In this task, the two French structuralists of the utmost importance were also the most proximate influences on the project: Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser.

From Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage (the Rome discourse, 1953), and Seminar II (1954-55) onwards, Lacan incorporated Saussures account of language and symbolic structure into his novel account of the Freudian unconscious. Lacans controversial thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language was consistent with structuralism as a theoretical movement in that it presented the site of signification as not only anterior to its manipulation by a conscious ego, but determinant of the experiences of consciousness in the first place. Moreover, the crucial element of Saussurean linguistics - difference - was transposed into Lacans own framework. It is the errant differentiation of the signifier itself that is constitutive of the unconscious for Lacan. It is not through reference to experiences independent of signification that unconscious life is determined for Lacan; rather, it is the mechanisms of signification itself that determines the content of the unconscious. For example, Lacan explains Freuds concepts of condensation and displacement in terms of metaphor and metonymy in language. The term structure was polyvalent in Lacans own work. Though he often referred to structuring processes (e.g., the unconscious is structured like a language), he also continued to refer to psychopathologies as having their own unique structures (for instance the structures of neurosis and psychosis). By the time of his seminars of the 1960s, the relation between structure and the subject had become Lacans primary preoccupation. Lacans suggestion that there could be a subject of the unconscious would provide an essential point of departure for several of the thinkers represented in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, who sought to test the compatibility of Lacans ideas about subjectivity with his structuralist tendencies Althusser conceived of structure in multiple ways as well. In the first place, society ought to be conceived as a structured totality, composed of economic, social and ideological levels. The task of theory is to articulate the structures that pre-exist our individual existence, such as the pre-structured hierarchy of relations of production and reproduction at the level of the economy. By the mid-sixties, Althusser had become preoccupied with problems about the kind of causal determination appropriate to structures. In his essay Contradiction and Overdetermination (1962), Althusser opposes adequate to simplistic conceptions of social determination: whereas a simple or expressive approach (as with Hegel or reductionist forms of Marxism) understands the various components of a society - its economy, political system, legal system, cultural forms, etc. - by referring them back to a single underlying cause, a structuralist approach appreciates the relative autonomy of each of these components, in the absence of unilaterally determinant centre. Such an approach is better suited, Althusser argues, to understand the concrete complexity of moments of social crisis, and thus grasp opportunities for revolutionary political change. In his contribution to Reading Capital (1965) Althusser sought to clarify the sort of structural causality at work in the determination of either an element or a structure by a structure: In other words, how is it possible to define the concept of a structural causality? [...]. This simple question was so new and unforeseen that it contained enough to smash all the classical theories of causality -- or enough to ensure that it would be unrecognized, that it would pass unperceived and be buried even before it was born. [...]. The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structures metonymic causality on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects8 But if the whole is already structured and all action is caught up in its mechanisms, how is it possible to present the structure as such? If there is nothing external to the structure determining it, how does one occupy an external position in order to assess it (and potentially determine it in different ways)? In other words, the fundamentally recursive nature of structuralism had become a theoretical problem for Althusser insofar as he hoped that structuralist thinking might prove to be an innovative path for a Marxist political practice. As Alain Badiou put it in his review of Althussers major works from the 1960s, Le (Re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique, the fundamental problem of all structuralism [remains] the problem of structural causality.9 Various solutions, sketched below, are presented to this problem over the course of the Cahiers. The term structure is already semantically overdetermined by the time of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Nevertheless, the line of questioning taken in the Cahiers is distinctive, and focuses on the internal limits of structuralism as a theory and method, on the foundations of structuralism as a science, and, most particularly, on the relation of subjectivity to structure.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

In Jacques Lacans La science et la vrit, the first article published in the Cahiers, several meanings of the term structure are already in play from the first sentence. Lacan asserts that he established the status of the subject in Seminar XII by developing a structure that accounts for the state of splitting [refente] or Spaltung (CpA 1.1:7; E, 855). One of the problems with analysing the term structure in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse is that in some articles, subjectivity is opposed to structure, while in others, there is a structure ofsubjectivity. The key passage on structuralism in the piece occurs in the context of a discussion of the limits of formalisation. Lacan suggests that Gdels incompleteness theorem shows the failure of logic to suture the subject of science. Subjectivity remains an antinomic correlate to logic, and science is said to be caught in a deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject (CpA 1.1:12-13; E 861). He suggests that this is the mark of structuralism that one should not miss [on sais[it] l la marque ne pas manquer de structuralisme]: how structuralism ushers in to every human science it conquers a very particular mode of the subject, which Lacan says he is only able to characterise by appealing to topology (in particular, the Moebius strip). This particular mode of the subject involves the internal exclusion of subjectivity from its object. Lacan contends that structural anthropology only manages to discover the pure structures underlying the social forms of primitive society on condition that it develops combinatorial analysis and the mathematics of the signifier. The closer the observer of traditional societies is to reducing his presence to that of the subject of science, the more correctly is the collection [of information] carried out. Structuralism on Lvi-Strausss model covers over this process. Therefore structuralism is by no means advancing towards a nonsaturated conception of a calculable subject, but rather to an encounter with its conditions in the subject of science. The specific structure with which Lacans psychoanalysis will concern itself is the division of the subject and emergence of the objet petit a. Lacan will suggest that the subject of

science carries out its own kind of negation: rather than repressing subjectivity, it forecloses it. In his other article in the Cahiers, Rponses des tudiants en philosophie sur lobjet de la psychanalyse (CpA 3.1). Lacan reiterates the primacy of the analysis of the relation of structure to subjectivity: Psychoanalysis as a science will be structuralist, to the point of recognizing in science a refusal of the subject (CpA 3.1:13; trans. 113). Jacques-Alain Millers 1964 paper Action de la structure was a direct attempt to deal with the relation between subjectivity and structure, but its publication was delayed to Volume 9 (devoted to the genealogy of the sciences). Millers Suture: lments de la logique du signifiant appeared in volume 1; the chronological order of publication will be followed here. In Suture Miller argues that at its most fundamental level the relation of the subject to the chain of discourse involves a suture, which only permits the subject to figure in discourse as the element that is lacking (in the form of a placeholder [tenant-lieu] (CpA 1.3: 39; trans. 26). If the subject is lacking from the chain of discourse, however, it is not purely and simply absent, and plays a dynamic role. Millers exposition is focused on articulating the general relation of lack to the structure of which it is an element. Basing himself on an analysis of Freges procedures in his construction of the series of whole natural numbers in The Foundations of Arithmetic, Miller identifies an implicit appeal tometaphor and metonymy in the construction of the relation between the zero and the one. Within the generative repetition [rptition gnitrice] of the series of numbers, (46/ 31) Miller discerns the structure of repetition, as process of the differentiation of the identical (46/31). The relation of the subject to structure is revealed in the flickering in eclipses of the symptom, whether this is found in theory or practice. From the perspective of the logic of the signifier, the signifying chain is the structure of structure (49/ 34). Miller concludes his piece with a reference to the issue of structural causality, to which he will return in Action de la structure. If structural causality (causality in the structure in so far as the subject is implicated in it) is not an empty expression, it is from the minimal logic which I have developed here that it will find its status (49/34). Serge Leclaire does not discuss structuralism directly in the Cahiers, but he uses the term structure in various different contexts. In the first instalment of Compter avec la psychanalyse, he discusses the structure and function of fantasy (CpA 1.5:62), the formation of which he attributes to the process of fixation of signifiers on the erogenous body. In his encounter with Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner in CpA 3, he will go on to question the absence of conceptions of the body, desire and drive from their more formalist accounts of the subjects relation to signification and structure (CpA 3.6:95) Thomas Herberts [Michel Pcheux] articles (CpA 2.6 and 9.5) also put the term structure to different uses. Given the Althusserian foundations of the first article, Rflexions sur la situation thorique des sciences sociales, the idea that society must be approached as structured totality is central from the beginning for Pcheux. But he also talks about the conflictual structure (CpA 2.6:149) of society, referring to the dynamic relation between the forces and relations of production in Marx. Herbert/Pcheuxs exploration, in CpA 9.5, of the relation between syntax and semantics in the production of ideology attempts to integrate structural linguistics with Marxist theory, an exercise he continues in his major workLes Vrits de la Palice [Language, Semantics and Ideology] (1975). In volume 3, two major articles by Andr Green and Luce Irigaray elaborate the place of structuralism within the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Responding in part to Lacans suggestions in La science et la vrit, Green claims that an analysis of the role of the objet petit a is essential in order to mark out the limitations of the modern structuralist dimension of Lacanian thought, and no doubt of all psychoanalytic thought) (CpA 3.2:16; trans. 164). Like Miller and Irigaray, he will attempt to provide a detailed account of the structuration (19; trans. 167) of the child in its relation to its parents and the wider symbolic order. He takes up Millers concept of suture, but argues that Millers structural account should be grounded in the symbolic castration of the child: The series of castrations postulated by Freud - weaning [sevrage], sphincter control [dressage sphinctrien], castrationproperly speaking are at the basis of the structuring and signifying repetition addressed by Miller (19; 167 translation modified). In tandem with Leclaire, Green claims that psychoanalysis must connect its structuralist account of language with a theory of the body. Recognising that any direct reference to the signified would destroy the structuralist enterprise, Green argues (1) that psychoanalysis must nevertheless incorporate reference to physical structures: our confidence in the stability of pertinent phonological traits ultimately depends on the functioning of the vocal apparatus (25; 175) and (2) that a purely structural linguistic approach is inadequate for psychoanalytic practice, insofar as it involves listening to meaning (ibid). In Communication linguistique et spculaire, Irigaray also sets out from the Lacanian psychoanalytic conception that what distinguishes humans from animals is their status as symbol-using beings, which presupposes their capacity as individuals to negotiate a series of social and linguistic structures. (CpA 3.3:39; trans. 9). In a detailed analysis, she shows how the formation of the subject takes place through its incorporation into linguistic structures. Taking up Millers account of the suture of the subject to structure, she remarks upon the analogy between the status of the on and [that of] the zero in the functioning of the structure of [linguistic] exchange. To grasp this operation is to understand that the unconscious is capable of being founded as structure and not as content (CpA 3.3:41; 11; trans. modified). She argues that all structure presupposes an exclusion, an empty set, its negation, as the very condition of its functioning. (46; 15, trans. modified), and the subject is a blank, a void, the space left by an exclusion, the negation that allows a structure to exist as such (41; trans. 10). In Le point du signifiant, Jean-Claude Milner opts to speak of the relation between subject and signifier in the signifying chain as a formal system, rather than a structure (CpA 3.5:78). Platos Sophist contains the rudiments of the logic of the signifier, but Plato himself is guilty of ignoring the structure of zero (CpA 82) that underlies his formulations. In the second instalment of Compter avec la psychanalyse, Leclaire turns to Freud for an account of how it is the sexual drives that put in place the radical structure in which the subject is not placed, characterised by the lack of a lost object (CpA 3.6:88). Maintaining the primacy of the drives, he nevertheless gives two structural models for the emergence of the subject into the symbolic order: the genealogical tree and the open cycle (93). In the debate between Leclaire, Miller and Milner in the question period, the nature of the constraint that marks subjectivity is discussed, with Milner claiming that the nature of the constraint can only be formal (95), while Leclaire insists on the primacy of the differentiation of the drives in the formation of the subject. In the final instalment of Compter avec la psychanalyse, Leclaire attempts a structural approach to the problem of repression. Taking up Lacans notion of the objet petit a, he argues that the structure of the unconscious can be described in terms of signifying concatenation: as a chain that has the effect of engendering a subject that it excludes and an object that falls out of it (CpA 8.6:93). In volume 4, Jacques Derridas Nature, Critique, criture (CpA 4.1) takes further the critical view towards Lvi-Strausss structuralism proposed by Lacan in Science et la vrit. Lvi-Strausss structural analysis of the Nambikwara mirrors Rousseaus presentation of a state of nature, a nostalgic description

of a crystalline and authentic society before violence and social hierarchies (CpA 4.1:27), that implicitly repeats a structure of violence (19). Only an original logic of arche-writing can prevent structuralism from replicating binary structures (34). Jean Mosconis article Sur la thorie du devenir de lentendement (CpA 4.2) follows up this line of thought by examining the implicit geneses that underpin ostensibly structuralist analyses (60). In his introduction to volume 5, Jacques-Alain Miller anticipates the account of structuration he will publish in Action of the structure. The procedure of enunciating structure must be grasped in in the time of its action. Only this approach will allow us to trace that which perpetuates the structuring operation in what results from it (CpA 5.Introduction:3). In Les lments en jeu dans une psychanalyse (CpA 5.1), Leclaire takes a closer look at the logic of the signifier proposed by Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner in Suture (CpA 1.3) and Le Point du signifiant (CpA 3.5) respectively. Leclaire notes how absence and disappearance are the principle of the structure of the signifier. He draws attention to Millers claim that the central paradox of the signifier in Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the trait of the identical represents the non-identical, from which can be deduced the impossibility of its redoubling, and from that impossibility the structure of repetition as the process of differenciation of the identical (CpA 5.1:12). Leclaire suggests that Miller and Milners proposals do not explain how the psychoanalyst can distinguish given signifiers in practice. While any element of discourse may be a signifier, the psychoanalyst must be able to differentiate between signifiers, to privilege some over others. He warns against the error of making the signifier no more than a letter open to all meanings, and reiterates that a signifier can be named as such only to the extent that the letter that constitutes one of its slopes necessarily refers back to a movement of the body (CpA 14). In the same volume, Michel Torts article takes up the problem of the structuration of the drives in psychoanalysis (CpA 5.2:54), but his account of psychic structure is largely confined to description of Freuds topographical view of the mind (as split between the structures of consciousness and the unconscious). In the extracts from Georges Dumzil in CpA 7, the term structure is only used once, to isolate a functional structure in common between Roman and Indian mythology (CpA 7.1:38). In Jean-Claude Milners article Grammaire dAragon (CpA 7.2), the structure of Aragon Aragons novel Mise mort is interpreted as a game or play [jeu], governed by an implicit but determinant set of rules which generate a set that can be referred back to a law. Identifying the multiple roles of the characters in the game, Milner shows how structural analysis can articulate the incessant overflowing (46) of signification and reflexivity that marks the modern novel. Jacques Nassifs article on psychoanalytic notions of fantasy (CpA 7.4) appeals to recent ideas put forward by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis about fantasies as structures with multiple entries.10 Like Leclaire and Green, as well as Lacan himself, Nassif uses the term structure in several ways. Individual neuroses have structures (73), but these structures contain places that can be occupied in fantasy. Nassif also echoes Leclaire and Green in taking the structure of sexual difference as bedrock in the determination of psychic structure (87). Louis Althussers essay on the social contract in Volume 8 attempts to identify the structure of the social contract, in order to yield up the paradoxical structure (CpA 8.1.15) of total alienation that underpins it. In Droit naturel et simulacre, Patrick Hochart undertakes a deconstructive analysis of the structure of moral personality in classical political philosophy (CpA 8.3:66-67). In volume 9, Foucaults Rponse au Cercle dpistmologie (CpA 9.2) attempts to go beyond a formalising approach to the theory of discourse by developing a theory of discursive formations. For Foucault, knowledge [savoir] is not science in the successive displacement of its internal structures; it is the field of its actual history (34; trans. 326). In their response to Foucault, the Cercle query as to what distinguishes Foucaults rules of formation from the rules already found in structuralism (CpA 9.3:42). In Dialectique dpistmologies, Franois Regnault relates the structure of the One in the Hypotheses of Platos Parmenides to the structure of the subject, by connecting Platos Hypotheses to a series of possible sutures and foreclosures of science by epistemology (CpA 9.4:60). He also makes a critique of combinatory or structuralist epistemologies that do not nothing but repeat pure multiplicity. A dialectic of epistemologies is necessary to mobilise structuralism within epistemology (69). In Action de la structure (CpA 9.6), Jacques-Alain Miller identifies Lacan as the theorist who has put the contemporary notion of structure to work in the most decisive manner. Lacanian psychoanalytic structuralism attempts to analyse the relation between structure and subjectivity and take account of the ineliminable feature of subjectivity in a way that has so far not been achieved by the structuralism based on linguistics. In the first section of the essay, simply entitled Structure, Miller says that structure can minimally be defined as that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes (95). Two functions qualify his concept of structure: structuration, or the action of the structure; and subjectivity, as subjected [assujettie]. The concept of structuration can be analysed into a structuring structure and a structured structure. The key mediating concept between structure and subject for Miller is the element of reflexivity (96): if we assume the presence of an element that turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects it and signifies it, an element capable of redoubling itself on its own account, then a transformation or a general distortion is produced, affecting the whole structural economy and recomposing it according to new laws. From the moment that the structure involves such an element, (1) its actuality can be said to have the status of an experience, (2) the virtuality of the structuring process is converted into an absence, (3) this absence is produced in the real order of the structure, and the action of the structure comes to be supported by a lack (95). In the section on Science, Miller reflects on the possibility of a Doctrine of Science that

would be able to consistently articulate structure and subject in a complex yet consistent way, thus permitting the establishment of a general theory of discourse. Antoine Culiolis article La formalisation en linguistique is a discussion of the possibilities for formalisation in structural linguistics. It begins by referring to Chomskys distinction between surface and deep structure in grammar (CpA 9.7:109).11 The formalisation of language involves appeal to mathematical and algebraic structures capable of articulating the basic syntactic and semantic features of language (111, 113). Culioli suggests that formalised notation could help resolve the problem of metalanguage, and create combinatories much more complex than those found in the analysis called structural which has so far only exposed impoverished structures (115). In her study of Galileo, Judith Miller shows how his physics requires a metaphysics of relation [mtaphysique de la relation]. This metaphysics has chosen the structuralist hypothesis in Hjelmslevs sense of the term, where the structuralist hypothesis requires us to define magnitudes [grandeurs] by relations and not vice versa (CpA 9.9:146) In Alain Badious two contributions to the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, La Subversion infinitsimale (CpA 9.8) and Marque et manque: propos du zro (CpA 10.8), the term structure is not analysed as such, but is used at key points of his argument. Developing an account of the conditions for change within an internally stratified nature of logical propositions and axioms, Badiou suggests how what is excluded from structures can reappear as the inaugural mark of a real process of production in a different structure (CpA 9.8:128). His main focus in these articles is on the history of mathematics, but he also intends his analysis to be applied within the theory of historical materialism. In Marque et manque he takes up this account of the autonomous stratification of logical form to criticise Jacques-Alain Millers account of the relation between subject and structure. Badiou presents the autonomous production of mathematical and logical structure is the real outside of human thought (CpA 10.8:162). Badious approach in these two pieces may be classed as hyper-structuralist in the sense that they abolish all place for a subject in any domain other than ideology.12 Devoted to the theme of Formalisation, Volume 10 presents analyses of formalisation and its limits from mathematics and analytic philosophy. This is the only volume of theCahiers without an introduction, but the texts appear to be chosen to respond to the problems of metalanguage and reflexivity within the theories of structure developed across previous articles. In La proposition particulire chez Aristotle (CpA 10.1), Jacques Brunschwig gives an account of the logical structure behind Aristotles theory of syllogisms. In 1966, Robert Blanch had published Structures intellectuelles, a work on logic, and his contribution to the Cahiers is an analysis of the structure of the square of opposition in logic, presenting a structuration of the table of sixteen binary connectors (CpA 10.7:135). Badious article is the only the only piece to explain how such problems in logic might be related to the fields of history and discourse.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancire. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Reading Capital, partial trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Althusser, Louis. Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero, 1965. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: Allen Lane, 1969. ---. Lnine et la philosophie. Paris: Maspero, 1969. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1972. Caws, Peter. Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988. Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge, 1975. Dosse, Franois. History of Structuralism [1991-1992], trans. Deborah Glassman, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Gandillac, Maurice de, Lucien Goldmann, and Piaget, Jean. Entretiens sur les notions de gense et de structure. Paris/The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965. Harland, Richard. Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. London: Methuen, 1987. Lacan, Jacques. crits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2005. Lefebvre, Henri. Le Concept de structure chez Marx. In Sens et usage du terme structure dans les sciences humaines, ed. Roger Bastide et al. The Hague: Mouton & Co, 1962. ---. Rflexions sur le structuralisme et lhistoire. Cahiers internationales de sociologie 35 (1963). Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Les Structures lmentaires de la parent. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. ---. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson. New York: Basic Books, 1963. ---. La Pense sauvage. Paris: Plon. 1962. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966. ---. Le Cru et le cuit. Mythologiques: Introduction la science de la mythologie, vol. 1. Paris: Plon, 1964. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato. The Structuralist Controversy. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1972. Ricoeur, Paul. Structure et hermneutique. In Le Conflit des interprtations. Paris: Seuil, 1969. The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Don Ihde. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique gnrale [1916], ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot, 1995. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. 1983.

Wahl, Franois, et al. Quest-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes
1. Ernst Cassirer, Structuralism in Modern Linguistics, Word 1 (1945), 120. 2. Franois Dosse, The History of Structuralism I, 237. 3. For a succinct overview of structuralism, see Peter Caws entry on the subject in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, http://www.historyofideas.org/cgi-local/DHI/dhiana.cgi?id=dv4-42. 4. Langue, as distinct from langage refers to a given language or tongue, e.g. French or English. These two langues are examples of a broader human phenomenon of langage or language as such. Parole translates as speech, and serves as the diachronic site of language in practice. 5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 120. 6. Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 10. 7. Claude Lvi-Strauss, Histoire et dialectique, La Pense sauvage, ch. 9. 8. Althusser, Reading Capital, 188-190. In his reference to metonymic causality in this passage, Althusser footnotes Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la Structure, which Miller distributed as a paper before publishing it in Volume 9 of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Althusser tried to clarify his definition a couple of years later: Structural causality is meant to draw attention to the fact that the classic philosophical category of causality (whether Cartesian linear causality or Leibnizian expressive causality) is inadequate for thinking the scientific analyses of Capital, and must be replaced by a new category. To give some sense of this innovation, we can say that, in structural causality, we find something that resembles the problem (often invoked by biologists) of the causality of the whole upon its parts, with the difference that the Marxist whole is not a biological, organic whole, but a complex structure that itself contains structured levels (the infrastructure, the superstructure). Structural causality designates the very particular causality of a structure upon its elements, or of a structure upon another structure, or of the structure of the whole upon its structural levels. As for overdetermination, it designates one particular effect of structural causality precisely the one I evoked a moment ago in connection with the theory of social classes: the conjunction of different determinations on the same object, and the variations in the dominant element among these determinations within their very conjunction. To go back to the example of social classes: we may say that they are overdetermined, since, in order to grasp their nature, we have to mobilize the structural causality of three levels of society, economic, political and ideological - with structural causality operating in the form of a conjunction of these three structural determinations on the same object, and in the variation of the dominant element within this conjunction (Althusser, The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy, The Humanist Controversy, 200-201). 9. Alain Badiou, Le (Re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique [review of Louis Althusser, Pour Marx and Althusser et al., Lire le Capital], Critique 240 (May 1967), 457. 10. Laplanche and Pontalis, Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality, 22; article cited in CpA 7.4:73, 76. 11. Jean-Claude Milner translated Chomskys Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1971. 12. After 1968 Badiou moved away from the Althusserian approach to subjectivity taken here, and in 1982 published his own Thorie du sujet (trans. 2009).

Subject Le sujet
Several novel conceptions of subjectivity are proposed in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Essays by Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Luce Irigaray, among others, attempt to refine a psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity compatible with structuralism, while other articles, by Alain Badiou and Thomas Herbert, for example, take a more critical approach to the concept of subjectivity and tie it to ideology. See also:

Desire, Drive, Ideology, Science, Structure, Suture In an essay on the work of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault famously distinguished between two traditions in twentieth-century French philosophy: on the one hand, a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, exemplified by the phenomenology and existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on the other hand, a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept, pursued by Jean Cavaills, Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyr and Canguilhem himself.1 Given the importance of the latter lineage of thought for the thinkers of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, one might then expect them to be dismissive of the concept of subjectivity tout court. However, Jacques-AlainMiller, Jean-Claude Milner, Franois Regnault and Alain Badiou were all profoundly influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, which sought above all to develop a new theory of subjectivity. Overall, the work of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse emerges out of an encounter between the philosophy of the concept of the French epistemology tradition, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian structural Marxism. The question of the subject is central to the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, and one of the key essays in volume 9, Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure (CpA 9.6) makes an explicit and detailed attempt to develop a concept of subjectivity in line with broadly structuralist priorities. In the first stage of Althussers structuralist reformulation of Marxism in the 1960s - the stage that resulted in the books For Marx and Reading Capital the subject was a generally neglected, if not derided category. Althusser took the subject in the sense of reflective consciousness, as well as in the sense of an individual and deliberate will, to be an essentially ideological category. Althusser generally excluded the category of the subject from his efforts to provide a philosophical grounding for Marxs science of historical materialism, and a Marxist concept of science more generally. In the mid1960s, however, at the very moment the Cahiers were being produced, Althusser made a temporary (and quickly abandoned) attempt to construct a theory of the subject compatible with structuralism. In a paper he circulated to a small group including Cahiers editors Yves Duroux and Alain Badiou, Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, Althusser allotted a place to what he called subjectivity-effects in the four discourses of science, ideology, art and the unconscious.2 However, he soon changed his mind, and in the Cover Letter for the three Notes (dated 28 October 1966), he says that everything I have said about the place of the subject in every one of the discourses must be revised. The more I work on it, the more I think that the category of the subject is absolutely fundamental to ideological discourse, that it is one of its central categories3. He adds that the subject is bound up with the truth-guarantee in the centred, double mirror structure. He concludes that it is not possible to talk about a subject of the unconscious, even if Lacan does, nor of a subject of science nor a subject of aesthetic discourse. Althusser stresses that his line of thought at the end of Note 1 needs to be very seriously modified, both because of the status it implicitly ascribes to the subject of the general theory and also because of the General Theory which it suggests is determinant.4 He thus abandons the notion of the subject, positing henceforth that history is a process without a subject. As far as Lacan himself is concerned, it is the act of speech which is constitutive of the subject, and by being of the subject, we do not mean its psychological properties, but what is hollowed out in the experience of speech (S1, 232, 230). From the Freudian point of view defended by Lacan in his early seminars, man is the subject captured and tortured by language (S3, 243). The subject that is thus subject to and represented by a signifier (for another signifier) is for the same reason barred, split and evanescent or fading. The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject (S11, 207-208). This is why analysis demonstrates that subjectification corresponds, along with an articulation of the repressed or an affirmation of the drive, a fundamental aphanisis, disappearance [...], the fading of the subject (S11, 207-208). Althussers classification of the subject and its relation to truth as ideological points to a major divergence with Lacan, for whom the relation between subject and truth is not ideological. Debates in the Cahiers will turn on this divergence. The question of the possibility of a non-ideological concept of subjectivity is directly related to the question of the scientificity of such a concept. Lacan himself addressed the subjects relation to both science and truth in the inaugural essay of the journal.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

In La Science et la vrit (CpA 1.1) Lacan gives his first written explanation of the concept of the subject of science. What did it mean to be a subject in the infinite universe opened up by Galileo and modern science? Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis existed because subjectivity still existed, as a form of non-knowledge, attached to the cause of truth. Science is caught in a deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject (CpA 1.1:12-13; E, 861), but

psychoanalysis can enable structuralism to explain the internal exclusion of subjectivity from the symbolic order, and the emergence of the objet petit a as the cause of desire. Lacans claims in this essay emerges out of ideas on the subject developed in Seminar XI, published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. In his establishment of the distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement, Lacan invokes the apparently paradoxical sentence I am lying. His distinction renders the expression unproblematic by making the I of the (conscious) statement function as a shifter that refers in discourse to the lying I of the (unconscious) enunciation, that is, the I that is doing the lying in the first place, thus making the statement at once possible and true.5 Lacans point is that the I of the statement obscures the more fundamental, unconscious I that determines the expression in the first place. The same basic structure is in play in Lacans thinking about science, namely that science establishes itself as discourse by ignoring, or repressing this split that makes it possible in the first place. Science wants to exclude the unconscious from its discourse, and attempts to do so by suturing the subject of science, that is, by having this subject qua agent persist in a kind of wilful ignorance - a lack of truth about truth - of its fundamentally split nature. In his Rponses des tudiants en philosophie sur lobjet de la psychanalyse (CpA 3.1), Lacan responds to a series of questions about subjectivity, consciousness and self-consciousness. In this text, he reiterates his interpretation of Descartes cogito, which he had characterised in La Science et la vrit as punctual and vanishing (CpA 1.1:9; E, 858). At a crucial point of the Cartesian askesis [the sceptical withdrawal of the Meditations] [...], consciousness and the subject coincide. It is holding that privileged moment as exhaustive of the subject which is misleading [...]. It is, on the contrary, at that moment of coincidence itself, insofar as it is grasped by reflection, that I intend to mark the site through which psychoanalytic experience makes its entrance. At simply being sustained within time, the subject of the I think reveals what it is: the being of a fall. In its purest sense, the Cartesian cogito is the subject of the unconscious, revealed only through parapraxes and symptoms. Lacan says that psychoanalysis affords us daily experience, through the encounter with patients symptoms, of a rift or split within subjectivity that consciousness attempts to repress. Lacan concludes his Rponses as follows: The best anthropology can go no further than making of man the speaking being. I myself speak of a science defined by its object. Now the subject of the unconscious is a spoken being, and that is the being of man; if psychoanalysis is to be a science, that is not a presentable object. [...] That is why psychoanalysis as a science will be structuralist, to the point of recognizing in science a refusal of the subject (CpA 3.1:12-13/trans. 113). The subject refused here is the subject of the unconscious, that is, the subject of enunciation, obscured or sutured over in discourse. Yves Durouxs Psychologie et logique (CpA 1.2) and Jacques-Alain Millers La Suture: lments de la logique du signifiant (CpA 1.3) suggest that although Freges Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) sets out from a critique of empiricist and Kantian idealist theories of subjectivity, his theory of logic and mathematics contains elements that can nevertheless be put to work in a psychoanalytic theory of unconscious subjectivity. For empiricism and idealism, the function of the subject is to bring about a synthesis, as a support of the operations of abstraction and unification. Miller claims that Freges genesis of the series of whole natural numbers rests on a primary metaphor, that of the substitution of 1 for 0, which in turn serves as the motor for a metonymic chain of successional progression (CpA 1.3:46). Freges theory of number is based on an alternation of a representation and an exclusion that is structurally analogous to the most elementary articulation of the subjects relation to the signifying chain (CpA 1.3:47). Serge Leclaire is at first resistant to Millers logical account of the subject. In LAnalyste sa place, he argues that it is rather the analyst who is like the subject of the unconscious, which is to say that he has no place and can have none (CpA 1.4:52). But Leclaires claim that the analyst has no place does not satisfy Miller, who wants to know from what position one can say such a thing. As his response to Leclaire in the 21st session of Lacans Seminar XII makes clear, Millers exacting concern with issues of system, reflexivity and metalanguage will not allow him to accept the privilege of the analyst without argument.6 In the Compter avec la psychanalyse sessions and his two written articles for the Cahiers, Leclaire tends to avoid metatheoretical questions and instead focuses on the original relation between drive and signifier in the constitution of subjectivity. He argues that the formal account of alternation and vacillation given by Miller must be rooted in the original split opened up by the loss of the maternal object (cf. CpA 2.5:133, CpA 3.6:87). In Cahiers volume 2, the question of subjectivity is taken up with relation to the social science of psychology. Canguilhem criticises psychology for having no real object, a situation that has resulted in its invasion and take over by political ideologies and technicism (CpA 2.1). In Rflexions sur la situation thorique des sciences sociales, et, spcialement, de la psychologie sociale (CpA 2.6), Thomas Herbert [Michel Pcheux] argues that all the philosophies of consciousness and the subject (that is almost to say, all of philosophy, except certain dissidents like Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) have the ideological function of repressing both the economic situation of capitalism, and the superegoic command that accompanies it at the ideological level (CpA 2.6:152). The theory of the subject must yield to the methods of psychoanalysis, linguistics and historical materialism, and give concrete accounts of how to struggle against ideology. What Herbert calls ideological practice concerns the transformation of a given consciousness into a new produced consciousness, by means of a reflection of consciousness upon itself (142). In Herberts second essay, Pour une thorie gnrale des idologies, the problem becomes how to identify the genuine mutations occurring in the field of ideology itself (CpA 9.5:92. Volume 3 returns to psychoanalysis with major contributions from Luce Irigaray, Andr Green, and Jean-Claude Milner, and a detailed discussion of key formal issues at the end of the volume. Green offers a critical engagement with Millers logic of the signifier in his exposition of Lacans theory of the objet petit a in CpA 3.2. Green argues that the subject, as theenunciator of the statement, is automatically placed outside the statement it makes, and is for this reason analogous to the absolute zero in Millers sense. However, for us this concept issues from the encounter with truth, insofar as it not only dissociates truth from its demonstration [manifestation] (identity with itself), but it also designates there as its place, through the blank or the trace that negates it (CpA 3.2:23; trans. 173, modified). He specifies that it is inadequate to see this concept only as a simple relation of absence. What should be pinpointed [cern] here is the relation of lack to truth.

Irigarays Communication linguistique et spculaire (CpA 3.3) gives a structuralist linguistic account of the conditions for the emergence of subjectivity. She claims that the genesis of the child-subject is initially brought about by his or her parents talking about them (CpA 3.3:40; trans. 10). This creates a minimal placeholder with which the child can identify. Irigaray charts the vicissitudes of this minimal subject through the acquisition of language and into the specular regime of visual representation, which offers a series of lures and deceptions, but also allows the subject to assume a place beyond representation. Xavier Audouards essay on Platos Sophist (CpA 3.4) expounds the relation between the logical subject (to which predicates are attached in a judgment), and the unconscious subject posited by Lacan. In searching for definitions, we attach predicates to a subject, but this subject is never fully included in any of the predicates. Audouard argues the subject only emerges retrospectively, once the process of dichotomy and division has been initiated (CpA 3.4:58) Platos Sophist is also the terrain of Jean-Claude Milners Le Point du signifiant (CpA 3.5), which argues that non-being, as clarified by Plato, is the signifier of the subject (78). According to Milner, this non-being appears at every moment the subject prepares to annul the whole signifying chain and start again from zero. If the chain is not annulled, then non-being appears in an alternating, symptomatic guise instead. In keeping with Lacans complex account of the emergence of desire (cf. Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious), Leclaire claims in CpA 3.6 that desire is the result of a cleavage by exclusion, that introduces the dimension of subjectivity or of redoubled alterity (CpA 3.6:93). In desire, rather than a synthetic subject encountering an objective given, a split subject confronts an objet petit a. The psychoanalytical account of the split subject is taken up further in volume 5 in the essays by Serge Leclaire (CpA 5.1) and Michel Tort (CpA 5.2). In volume 6, Martial Gueroult develops Fichtes critique of Rousseaus account of moral conscience. On the basis of Kants ethics, Fichte criticises Rousseaus account of conscience as something simultaneously natural and divine, putting in its place a distinction between nature and right (CpA 6.1:17) and establishing the primacy of an auto-legislating concept over inchoate notions of feeling in the subjective determination of right. Jacques Bouveresses LAchvement de la rvolution copernicienne (CpA 6.7) and Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure (CpA 9.6:103-105) also argue for the ongoing relevance of Fichtes theory of subjectivity for epistemology and political theory. Bouveresse claims that Fichte propagates a Copernican revolution in ethics that goes hand in hand with a vigorous denunciation, and attempt at an explanation of, capitalist anarchy (CpA 6.7:130 In his essay on Humes theory of authority (CpA 6.5), Bernard Pautrat argues that Hume dissolves the link found in Locke between the philosophical subject and the political subject, and abandons the project of protecting an illusory autonomy (CpA 6.5:71). Instead, Hume proposes a psychology of obedience that will lead the political subject to its natural place, that of subjection (72). Pautrat suggests that Humes shift from a philosophy of the subject to a political psychology of the system of subjection succeeds in transcending the ideology of the period. In his exchange with the Cercle dpistmologie in volume 9, Michel Foucault notes that as a result of the achievements of psychoanalysis, linguistics and structuralist anthropology, the very idea of a spontaneous synthesising subject is in the process of disappearing (CpA 9.2:12; trans. 301). In their reply to Foucaults Rponse, the Cercle criticise Foucaults impersonal account of discursive events for occluding the dimension of enunciation that is necessary to distinguish an event from a mere element in a structure (CpA 9.3:43-44). In Action de la Structure (CpA 9.6), Jacques-Alain Miller goes against the Althusserian grain by appealing directly to the notion of subjectivity. He stipulates that the subject will no longer figure in the form of a regent, but as a subjected subject [sujette] (CpA 9.6:98). Although it is required by representation, this subjectivity is not required to occupy the position of a foundation. Millers subject retains none of the attributes of the psychological, nor the phenomenological subject. Its conscious being is determined by structural mechanisms. The theory of the subject must start from structure, taking its insertion for granted. It is essential to preserve the order: from structure to subject. Millers derivation of subjectivity from structure depends on the introduction of an unspecified reflexive element into the presupposed structure. At first, the subject that emerges out of this primary structuration is nothing but a support, a subjected subject. Subjectivity can be defined as reflexive in the imaginary, and non-reflexive in the process of structuration itself. The subject misrecognises what motivates it, attempting to compensate for its emptiness. The subject is thus fundamentally deceived: its miscognition is constitutive. Alienation is intrinsic to the subject, which only becomes an agent in the imaginary. Nevertheless, through pursuing the goal of a doctrine of science, the subject may participate in the infinite activity of desire (CpA 9.6:104), and manage in part to transcend alienation. In Marque et manque: propos du zero (CpA 10.8), Alain Badiou criticises Millers entire project to save a conception of the subject by appealing to a logic of the signifier. Badiou notes that for Lacan and by extension for Miller, the articulation of the subject is conceived through a system of concepts called the logic of the Signifier: Lack, Place, Placeholder, Suture, Foreclosure, Splitting. A placeholder of lack, the Lacanian subject is an instance of non-identity and non-self-coincidence. Badiou claims that science and in particular the mathematical writing fundamental to science excludes all lack and all non-self-coincidence, and he thereby denies that there is any subject of science in the Lacanian sense; science should rather be understood as the psychosis of no subject (CpA 10.8:161-62). Badious first major book of philosophy, Theory of the Subject (1982), is in large part a vigorous critique of the limitations of the merely structural conception of things developed in the Cahiers. It affirms the primacy of a revolutionary, post-Maoist subject as the driving force of political change. In developing a theory of that active if not voluntarist subject which is precisely excluded from the Cahiers project, Badiou here distinguishes the (a) historical aspect of the dialectic (which involves destruction of an old order and the deliberate, consistent recomposition of a new configuration) from (b) its structur5al aspect (which follows, with Mallarm and then Lacan, the trajectory of a vanishing cause), and privileges the former over the latter.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Trois Notes sur la thorie des discours, crits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: IMEC, 1995. Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967), ed. Franois Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2003. Badiou, Alain. Thorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009. ---. Le Sujet et linfini, in Conditions. Paris: Seuil, 1992. The Subject and Infinity in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. ---. Y a-t-il une thorie du sujet chez Georges Canguilhem?, in tienne Balibar et al., Georges Canguilhem: Philosophe et historien des sciences, Actes du Colloque (6-7-8 dcembre 1990). Paris: Albin Michel, 1993. 295-304. Is There a Theory of the Subject in Georges Canguilhem?, trans. Graham Burchell. Economy and Society 27:2 (1998). Etienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, and Alain de Libera. Sujet. In Vocabulaire europen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Subject, trans. David Macey. Radical Philosophy 138 (July/August 2006): 15-41. Foucault, Michel. La Vie: exprience et science. Revue de mtaphysique et de morale 90:1 (1985). Life: Experience and Science, trans. Robert Hurley. In Foucault: The Essential Works, vol. 1: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion. London: Penguin, 1998. Frege, Gottlob. The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1980. Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Alan Sheridan, trans. London: Penguin, 1977. ---. Seminar XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1965-66), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript. Miller, Jacques-Alain. Contribution to Lacans Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 21st session. Wahl, Franois. Le structuralisme en philosophie, in Quest-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes
1. Foucault, Life: Experience and Science, 466. 2. Althusser, Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, 48. 3. Ibid, 37-38. 4. Ibid., 38. 5. Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 138-42 6. See Millers response in Lacan, Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 21st session (2 June 1965), 4.

Metaphor/Metonymy La mtaphore/la mtonymie

The related functions of metaphor and metonymy were central to Lacans rethinking of psychoanalysis in terms of structural linguistics. These concepts were a crucial resource for the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, especially in their investigations into structural causality and the concept of ideology. See also:

Desire, Ideology, Linguistics, Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, Signifier, Structural Causality Though metaphor has been a longstanding trope of philosophical thought dating back to Aristotles Poetics, the specific distinction between metaphor and metonymy put to use in the Lacanian enterprise was developed by the linguist Roman Jakobson in a 1956 article titled Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances. There Jakobson argued that language is comprised of two axes, a metaphorical axis and a metonymic axis. The metaphoric axis was the site of substitution, the domain wherein linguistic terms may be substituted for one another in the production of meaning. By contrast, the metonymic axis was the site of sequential ordering, that is, the domain in which signifiers concatenate to form syntactically ordered sentences or expressions. Thus, Jakobsons distinction was consistent with Ferdinand de Saussures rethinking of language as split between paradigmatic relations, which, qua sites of linguistic meaning, hold in absentia, and syntagmatic relations, which eo ipso hold in only in presentia. The metaphor/metonymy distinction correlates to many other conceptual binaries that were important for Lacan and for the more specific project of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, which was equally inspired by the tradition of French epistemology. As the site of meaning, metaphor concerned the relation of signifier to signified, that is, the process whereby the signifier comes to produce meaning in a given context. (Here some of the original, etymological sense of the Latin metaphora or Greek metaphor is retained, as respectively the carrying over or transference of meaning, with the latter term having an especially pointed resonance in the psychoanalytic context). Likewise, metonymy, as the domain of sequential ordering, concerns solely the chain of signification, that is, the sequence of signifiers irrespective of the metaphorical function that generates meaning. Lacans appropriation of Jakobsons distinction, combined with his engagement with Saussurean linguistics, was one of the major innovations of his thought. But it was also by and large consistent with a distinction developed in Jean Cavaillss essay Sur la logique et la thorie de la science (1946), a key text for the Cahiers. Through a critical analysis of logical positivism, Cavaills developed a conceptual distinction between two logical sequences, thematisation and paradigmatisation, wherein the former has a reflexive structure that generates meaning (like metaphor) and the latter describes the actualising or longitudinal process that serves as thematisations base but remains abstract without the reflexive movement of the thematic.1 While Cavaills was a crucial resource for the engagement with logic in the Cahiers, it remains the case that Lacan was the primary influence. The metaphor/metonymy distinction receives its most sustained elaboration in one of Lacans most famous crits, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud (1957). Here Lacan makes use of the more generic sense of metonymy as meaning the part taken for the whole to describe the signifying function of language in toto. The signifying chain that is language itself is essentially metonymic in that it is comprised of a sequence of letters or signifiers that stands in for its putative reference. Lacan writes: I shall designate as metonymy the first aspect of the actual field the signifier constitutes, so that meaning may assume a place there (E, 506). The assumption of meaning is named metaphor: Metaphors creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the others place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) relation to the rest of the chain. One word for another: this is the formula for metaphor... (E, 507). What is more, we see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning (E, 508). For Lacan, then, metaphor is essentially a process ofcondensation, the production of meaning in a discrete instance, whereas metonymy is essentially one of displacement, the process whereby meaning is always deferred or displaced within a signifying chain. In this regard, the symptom is a metaphor, as a locus of condensed meaning, and desire is a metonymy (E, 528) as the procedural operation that displaces or defers symptoms and their meaning. Lacan ties his new frame to the Freudian edifice most pointedly in his rethinking of the Oedipus complex as the site wherein the paternal metaphor - the phallus, functioning as the Name-of-the-Father and inducting the child into the symbolic order - converts the originary desire for the mother into the metonymic chain of desire in language, itself a displacement without end constitutive of the subject of the unconscious.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

The Lacanian conception of metaphor and metonymy is integral to Jacques-Alain Millers reading of Frege. in La Suture: lments dune logique du signifiant (CpA 1.3). There Miller mobilizes the sense of metaphor as a vertical condensation that establishment the displacement of the signifying chain in his assessment of the genesis of the whole number line out of the zero in Freges Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Miller argues that the verticality of the movement from zero, by which the 0 lack comes to be represented as 1 [...], indicates a crossing, a transgression; the successor operation installs a

horizontal sequence of numbers on the basis of this primary verticality (CpA 46-47, trans. 31). Whereas logical representation tends to collapse this construction, the Lacanian concepts of metaphor and metonymy are capable of articulating this construction within a logic of the signifier. The primary metaphor of the substitution of 1 for 0 is the motor for the metonymic chain of successional progression. Miller contends that that we thus arrive at the structure of repetition, as the process of the differentiation of the identical (46/32). He concludes: If the series of numbers, metonymy of the zero, begins with its metaphor, if the 0 member of the series as number is only the standing-in-place suturing the absence (of the absolute zero) which moves beneath the chain according to the alternation of a representation and an exclusion - then what is there to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subjects relation to the signifying chain? (47/32) The suture that simultaneously establishes and annuls the subject is legible in Freges discourse only through the conceptual frame of the metaphor/metonymy relation developed by Lacan. In her development of the logic of specularisation in Lacans and Millers arguments in volume three, Luce Irigaray points to the predominant role of metaphor over metonymy in psychosis, as well as their inverse relation in neurosis. The psychotic comes face to face with the metaphoric layering of life and death rather than living their metonymic succession, which alone is bearable (CpA 3.3:50, trans. 19). Hence the anxiety of the psychotic occurs at a different level to the anxiety of the neurotic, who is unable to metaphorise since he is bound to a signifying chain in which he feels constitutively inadequate, carried forth in an endless metonymic sequence. Riveted to what he has been the obsessional neurotic is unable to become. In his reading of Balzacs Sarrasine in volume seven, Jean Reboul emphasises the metonymic nature of desire in Sarrasines regard for Zimbanella and its ultimate condensation in a metaphoric bond occurring in the imaginary. Out of a partial and metonymic desire of the object, he bonds with the specular image of a structured being, and projected into this other little imaginary, he constitutes himself at the same instant that the other finally appears to him as constituted (CpA 7.5:94). Thomas Herberts Remarques pour une thorie gnrale des idologies CpA 9.5) in volume nine is the most ambitious attempt to take the metaphor/metonymy relation out of the strictly psychoanalytic framework into a more general theory of ideology. Herbert (the pseudonym for Michel Pcheux) relies heavily on the theories of Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to distinguish between empiricist ideologies that seek to correlate signifiers to actual objects and the more tenacious speculative ideologies that determine a field of meaning as such regardless of correlation to a putatively external reality. Taking inspiration from the relationship between (semantic) metaphor and (syntactical) metonymy in Lacanian thought, Herbert shows how metonymic relations in one domain, e.g., the economic, become metaphorically displaced into, and as a consequence establish relations with, other domains, such as the political or the ideological (CpA 9.5:85-87). For example, in capitalism, economic relations are effectively metonymical, its constitutive terms - salary, worker, contract, boss, etc. - only making sense in their differential relationship to one another. Through the very organization of the economic field of production, however, these metonymic sequences become condensed into semantmes, units of meaning; each term is effectively shorthand for the whole sequence. This very compression metaphorically displaces these meanings into the adjacent field of the political, wherein they constitute a politico-juridical axiomatic whose own internal coherence blinds it to its origin). Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure (CpA 9.6), also in volume nine, is one of the programmatic texts of the Cahiers enterprise. Drafted in 1964, this text sketches the lineaments of a theory of structural causality conceived as metonymic causality. Putting forth a position more fully developed in Herberts preceding article, Althusser himself cites Millers formulation in his own contribution to Reading Capital as follows: The absence of the cause in the structures metonymic causality on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to its economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects2188). For Miller, again metonymy is a sequence of displacement that is inaugurated through the metaphorisation of the cause qua lack that determines a given a discourse or sequence. He writes: We will therefore need to explore the space of the displacement of the determination. At once univocal, repressed and interior, withdrawn and declared, onlymetonymic causality might qualify it. The cause is metaphorised in a discourse, and in general in any structure for the necessary condition of the functioning of structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the cause. Fundamental law of the action of the structure (CpA 9.6:102). In the preamble that introduces the Chemistry Dossier that concludes this volume of the Cahiers, the editors suggest the limitations of a metaphorical approach to science (CpA 9.11:168). This metaphorical or analogical approach results whenever one specific science serves as the basis for a general discourse on science. What is advocated here, by contrast, is a grasp [reprise] of science as a whole which betokens a focus solely on relations, and hence, by implication, the metonymic sequences of sciences conceptual development over the metaphoric substitution at its source.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis, et. al. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1968. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Aristotle. Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Jakobson, Roman. Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances (1956). In Selected Writings, vol. II, Word and Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1971. Lacan, Jacques. crits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. crits, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Notes
1. Cavaillss use of paradigm here is different from Saussures, in that Cavaills uses the concept to describe the actuality of syntax, whereas for Saussure it is the site of the established meaning. Cavaills deliberately more historical approach is grounded in the semantics of Alfred Tarski. 2. Reading Capital,

Ideology Lidologie
Equally inspired by Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, the Cahiers pour lAnalyse witnessed an effort to produce a formalised account of ideology in accordance with the tenets ofpsychoanalysis and Marxism. The relation of ideology to science would be a fundamental site of discord within the Cahiers themselves. See also:

Epistemological Break, Science Though in its most conventional usage the term ideology refers to something like worldview or outlook, and in contemporary political discourse it is often used to distinguish political party lines, the concept of ideology occupies a crucial, and contested, position in the history of Marxist thought. The term was first coined by Destutt de Tracy in 1796, yoking together the roots -logy and ideo- to denote the science of ideas. The word first became a mark of opprobrium when Napoleon castigated the republicanism of the idologuesopposed to his reforms.1 But it was with Marxs essay The German Ideology that the term first set off on its complex trajectory in the Marxist canon itself.2 For Marx, the German ideology referred to an excessive investment in the domain of pure thought, rather than the world of concrete material relations and conditions, dominant among the Young Hegelians. Marx articulated his method in opposing terms: In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated and thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this lifeprocess.3 The idealist philosophy of the Young Hegelians, a group which included Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others, was, for all intents and purposes, backwards. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life [...] Where speculation ends - in real life - there real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.4 In this work, Marx is targeting a specific body of thought, the German ideology of post-Hegelian speculative philosophy. But Marxs critique of the German ideology also provides the lineaments of a critique of ideology tout court as a kind of blindness to real, material conditions. With Engels, the concept will come to be roughly equivalent to false consciousness, in particular the false consciousness of a working class mystified by the ideas of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie. In 1923, Georg Lukcs published his History and Class Consciousness, a book written remarkably without the benefit of The German Ideology or other of Marxs early writings.5 In this seminal text for Western Marxism, the overcoming of alienation is tantamount to an escape from the self-alienating false consciousness of the positivistic and empirical worldview of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat was the class that would accomplish this overturning, and its mechanism would be the work of a generalised class consciousness developed and fortified in both theory and practice. But Lukcs recognised, no less than Engels had before, that the proletariat was mystified in bourgeois ideology. Consequently, in a synthesis of Hegelianism and Leninism, he insisted upon the need for a revolutionary party leadership that has already broken with ideology and incarnates the consciousness of the epoch. For Lukcs, overcoming ideology meant abandoning the positivism and empiricism of the sciences through a dialectical thinking of the social totality. If his thinking restored something of the dialectical elements of Marxs thought, certain aspects of Lukcs project seemed to go against the grain of Marxs own writings, e.g., the claim that positive science begins when empty talk about consciousness ceases. The return to the humanism (and Hegelianism) of the young Marx ushered in by Lukcs work, along with the collapse of the Stalinist model of Soviet Communism, provides the essential framework for understanding Louis Althussers intervention into Marxist theory and his arguments concerning ideology more specifically. Polemically positioning himself in opposition to Marxist humanism, Althusser insisted in a series of works in the 1960s that Marx had indeed founded a science, the science of historical materialism, and that what made this a science was its epistemological break with the humanist, and Hegelian, ideology of Marxs youth. Althussers relentless affirmation of science in its opposition to ideology would be of crucial importance to the normaliens behind the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Many definitions of ideology can be found throughout Althussers oeuvre, but they all share a common theme insofar as ideology ceases to be confused with anything like false consciousness and comes to be tantamount to a category coextensive with the domain of lived experience itself. The most famous definition of ideology in Althussers writings comes from his essay Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation (1970), a text which reflects Althussers own theoretical investigations undertaken in correspondence with the editors of the Cahiers.6 There ideology is defined as a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.7 In this essay, Althusser refined his position on ideology as it was expressed in For Marx and Reading Capital, wherein the science/ideology distinction was of primary concern. In Marxism and Humanism (1964), Althusser had asserted that whereas socialism is a scientific concept, humanism is an ideological one. When I say that the concept of humanism is an ideological concept (not a scientific one), I mean that while it really does designate a set of existing relations, unlike a scientific concept, it does not provide us with a means of knowing them; it does not give us their essences.8 Marx arrived at his scientific theory of history, historical materialism, by showing that the framework of the alienation of human essence found in Feuerbach was essentially ideological.

Althussers goal in this essay was to make the case for a science that had broken with ideology, and in this it remained crucially reliant upon The German Ideology. But the lineaments of Althussers later position concerning ideology as the domain of practice itself were already clear: An ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role within a given society.9 As such, ideology is an organic part of every social totality and the very idea of a society without ideology is an ideological one. This being the case, the aim of theoretical practice should be to transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history.10 It is here that Althussers break with a notion of ideology as false consciousness is its most evident. Ideology, he maintains, is not something that takes place on the level of consciousness. Rather, it is is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form. Ideology is indeed a system of representations, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with consciousness: they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their consciousness.11 Althussers arguments in this essay reflect his own engagement with Jacques Lacans ideas around this time. In 1964, the same year Marxism and Humanism first appeared, Althusser also published Freud and Lacan in La Nouvelle Critique. The publication of this text in the official intellectual journal of the French Communist Party was a deliberate attempt to make the case for psychoanalysiss pertinence to the Marxist enterprise despite years of neglect and dismissal by the official party line. Althusser understood his own relation to Marx in a manner similar to Lacans relation to Freud; both were saving the genius of the master from ideological mystification through a return to the originals anti-humanism and scientism. Beyond methodological similarities, however, Althussers use of the term imaginary - in both Marxism and Humanism and in the later essay on ideological state apparatuses must be understood in a Lacanian sense. In his earliest writings, Lacan had introduced a tripartite distinction among the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic. If the real referred to the un-representable materiality of existence itself, and the symbolic referred to the domain of signification constituted by the subjects entrance into language, the imaginary expressed the stage wherein the subject first miscognises itself as a discrete, embodied subject in a broader field of relations. This was the thesis of Lacans famous lesson on the mirror stage (E 93-100), which described the moment wherein the infant, seeing himself in the mirror for the first time (or another enfant whose movements he mimics) identifies his own ego with the image of himself as a constituted whole. In this very identification, an inadequacy is established in that, given the infants limited motor control, he cannot fully live up to the wholeness of the ego-ideal experienced in the specular image of himself. The site of this phenomenon is the domain of the imaginary in Lacans rubric. The Lacanian imaginary was a crucial component of Althussers theory of ideology. For Lacan, the specular identification constitutive of the imaginary as a field of representations was a thoroughly unavoidable, and inescapable, element of lived existence. For Althusser, the field of ideology was equally omnipresent and the domain in which all practical relations effectively took place. It was the task of science, for Althusser, and psychoanalysis for Lacan, to articulate and make known the structure thinking the relation between science and ideology and the practical implications of making this distinction were arguably the two primary concerns of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

The first direct mention of ideology in the Cahiers is in Jacques-Alain Millers La Suture: lments dun logique du signifiant (CpA 1.3). Millers goal in this text is to show how the constitution of whole numbers in Freges Foundations of Arithmetic is predicated upon a suture which covers over an inaugural lack. In positing the number zero as the concept for the category that which is not identical to itself, Frege also establishes the concept of unity, or One, that will then allow, via the successor function, the proliferation of whole numbers. Miller detects the ideological gesture par excellence in this attribution of unity, via the concept or name of zero, to that which is essentially void, or lack. He writes: For the unity which is thus assured both for the individual and the set, it only holds in so far as the number functions as its name. Whence originates the ideology which makes of the subject the producer of fictions, short of recognizing it as the product of its product - an ideology in which logical and psychological discourse are wedded with political discourse occupying the key position, which can be seen admitted in Ockham, concealed in Locke, and miscognized thereafter (CpA 1.3:41). The fiction in question here is that of a full self-presence akin to that established in the specular miscognition of Lacans mirror stage. Miller invests this problematic with political weight, seeing it as formally related to the putative self-presence of the autonomous subject in political liberalism (hence the reference to Locke). Volume 2 of the Cahiers is titled, Quest-ce que la psychologie?. Although Georges Canguilhem does not use the term ideology in the essay that opens this volume (CpA 2.1), in the following piece Robert Pagss addresses the role that ideological implications play in Canguilhems assessments of the social and psychological sciences (CpA 2.2:96). The main concern of Canguilhems essay is the difficulty that psychology has historically had in determining its scientific object and its relationship with other modes of social practice and inquiry. Volume 2 concludes with the first of Thomas Herberts two contributions to the Cahiers (Herbert was the pen name for Michel Pcheux). In this piece, titled, Rflexions sur la situation thorique des sciences sociales et, spcialement, de la psychologie sociale (CpA 2.6), Herbert develops a critique of social psychology modelled on the epistemologyAlthusser outlined in his essay On the Materialist Dialectic.12 Herbert describes the theoretical practice anterior to an epistemological break as ideological practice, but also affirms the persistence of ideological contents alongside all forms of theoretical and political practice (CpA 2.6:144-5). Herbert claims that psychology and social psychology, especially when they have resort to models and practical instruments, remain caught in the ideological schema of the realisation of the real (CpA 2.6:155). They remain governed by economic conditions, reflecting the social relations characteristic of capitalism and the ideology of adaptation (CpA 2.6:157). This ideology, nevertheless, is different in kind to the inessential ideologies of alchemy or ancient astronomy, for example. Developing Althussers account of the three generalities involved in the process of theoretical practice,

Herbert suggests that the ideology of the social sciences can be taken precisely as the first set of generalities upon which theoretical practice sets to work. Theoretical practice does not aim to realise the real, but rather to trace the breaks that constitute new sciences, and to show how, once constituted, the objects of these sciences are capable of methodical reproduction (CpA 2.6:160).Herberts later contribution to the Cahiers (CpA 9.5) will attempt this practice in an examination of the emergence and reproduction of ideology itself. In his Rponses des tudiants en philosophie sur lobjet de la psychanalyse (CpA 3.1) in volume 3, Lacan uses the term ideology in a derisive manner that is nonetheless evocative of its Althusserian usage as he explains the origins of his argument concerning the mirror-stage: The autonomous ego, the conflict-free sphere proposed as a new Gospel by Mr. Heinz Hartmann to the New York circle is no more than the ideology of a class of immigrants preoccupied with the prestigious values prevailing in central European society when with the diaspora of the war they had to settle in a society in which values sediment according to the scale of income tax (CpA 3.1: 8 trans. 108-09). In his Nature, Culture, criture in volume 5, Jacques Derrida describes the Saussurian exclusion of writing as ideology (CpA 4.1:28) and ultimately goes on to criticize Lvi-Strausss political ideology as an example of the metaphysics of presence (CpA 4.1:41): Previously the empirical character of the analyses concerning the status of science and the accumulation of knowledge removed all rigor from each of the propositions advanced and permitted their consideration with an equal pertinence as true or false. It is the pertinence of the question which appeared doubtful. The same thing happens here again. What is called enslavement can equally legitimately be called liberation. And it is at the moment that this oscillation is stopped on the signification of enslavement that the discourse is frozen into a determined ideology that we would judge disturbing if such were our first preoccupation here (CpA 4.1:41; trans. 131). In the same issue, Jean Jean Mosconi also assesses Lvi-Strausss work and its return to an originary model of culture as being against the ideology of the progress of the human mind [esprit] (CpA 4.2:53). In volume 5, devoted to Freud, Michel Tort concludes that, by taking biology as his model of scientificity, Freud winds up with an ideological concept of drive (CpA 5.2:65): that Freud should finish up with pure speculation is sufficient to indicate without ambiguity that this biology is an ideological myth [...] A form of scientificity which can only be imported into a domain in a speculative form is ideological for sure. Volume 6 concerns La politique des philosophes and contains Franois Regnaults La pense du Prince, an assessment of Machiavellis efforts to produce a science of politics in the ideological terrain that was given to him (CpA 6.2:34). Bernard Pautrat.s introduction of texts by Hume emphasises the latters destruction of the notion of autonomous subjectivity one finds in Lockes example and develops his alternative univocal conception of the subject as that which is obedient or subjected to authority (CpA 6.5). Nonetheless, Pautrat remarks, the imaginary subject of illusory autonomy persists and continues to ground psychology as ideology as such (CpA 6.5:73). In the final article of this issue, Jacques Bouveresse criticises the romantic and messianic elements in Fichtes political thought which, by allowing for the belief in some kind of direct access to the Idea, make possible all the aberrations of the ideology of the Leader (CpA 6.7:107). Volume 8 of the Cahiers is devoted exclusively to LImpense de Jean-Jacques Rousseau and opens with Louis Althussers famous reading of the discrepancies [dcalages] that constitute Rousseaus theory of the social contract (CpA 8.1). Althusser concludes that the tensions that inhere in Rousseaus theory, and which surround the equivocal nature of the particular in its relation to the general will, can only be surmounted through a permanent flight forward in ideology (a ceaseless effort to educate and purify the interests and morals of the individuals who make up the social contract) on the one hand, and on the other, an effort to regress or turn the clock back in (economic) reality, by retreating to the old dream of independent commerce, i.e. of petty artisanal production (CpA 8.1:39-41). The only means of achieving this latter goal, however, is yet more moral preaching. Rousseaus attempt to propose a practical means of suppressing the existence of social classes or factions thereby falls into a vicious circle: flight forward in ideology, regression in the economy, flight forward in ideology, etc. This final discrepancy is thus the Discrepancy of theory with respect to the real in its effect: a discrepancy between two equally impossible practices. As we are now in reality, and can only turn round and round in it (ideology-economy-ideology, etc.), there is no further flight possible in reality itself. End of the Discrepancy (42). Althusser concludes his analysis with the suggestion that Rousseaus fictions - e.g., mile, La Nouvelle Heloise - are the site of this ideological flight forward. In the next article of this issue, Alain Grosrichard makes a virtue of this ostensibly critical remark of Althussers in order to argue that the moral preaching in Rousseaus literary output constitutes a necessary ideological counterweight to the analyses found in the Discourses and other political writings. It is the tension established between these two poles of his thinking that constitutes the Gravit de Rousseau, the title of Grosrichards article (CpA 8.2). In volume 9, Gnalogie des sciences, Franois Regnaults Dialectique dpistmologies (CpA 9.4), assumes the Althusserian distinction between science and ideology as a matter of course in its effort to enumerate the possible relations between a science and a theory of science, that is, an epistemology. The most extensive engagement with ideology in the whole of the Cahiers is also found in this issue in Thomas Herberts second article, titled: Remarques pour une thorie gnrale des idologies (CpA 9.5). In this article, Herbert pursues an extremely technical analysis that complements his earlier invocation of Althussers arguments from On the Materialist Dialectic with a more robust engagement with Lacans account of metaphor and metonymy in the chain of signification. The primary concern is how ideological semantmes, or units of meaning become displaced from one level of the social totality (e.g., the economic) to another (e.g., the political), and how, in turn, this very displacement mechanism creates the possibility of an ideological mutation in the transfer:

As the horizontal articulation of ideological elements according to a syntactic structure, the metonymic effect produces a rationalization-automisation at all structural levels, each of which will now appear endowed with internal coherence. In this way the subjects identification to the political and ideological structures that constitutesubjectivity as the origin of what the subject says and does (the norms he states and practices) is produced: this subjective illusion through which, to use aphenomenological expression, the consciousness of being in a situation is constituted hides from the agent his own position in the structure (CpA 9.5:88). In order to further clarify the metonymy/metaphor relation in the production of ideological subjectivity, Herbert turns to Lvi-Strausss distinction between the law and the rule. In effect, Herbert argues, one will never be able to break from a set of ideological coordinates by focusing on the rules which govern a network of syntactical relations; much more crucial is the law which institutes these rules in the first place. This distinction allows Herbert to contrast the implications of his framework from a focus on class consciousness in a Lukcsian vein. Becoming aware of the pre-conscious rules which structure a social totality is insufficient for liberating a subject from his alienation; what is needed is a confrontation with the mechanism of the unconscious Law which determines the set of rules in the first place. This mechanism is the object of analysis in Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure, also published in volume 9 of the Cahiers. Again developing Lacans theories on this score, Miller considers ideology in terms of an imaginary miscognition (CpA 9.6:96). More specifically, Miller claims that ideology always accompanies scientific discoursebecause the latter is established through the exclusion of lack (a process described a propos of Frege in CpA 1.3). But since, for Miller, the lack of a lack is also a lack, the lack of the lack leaves in every scientific discourse the mark of the miscognition, of the ideology that accompanies it, without being intrinsic to it. (CpA 9.6:102). Insofar as science involves a foreclosure, it leaves a space where ideology can be fostered. Appealing to the idea of an impossible and anonymous doctrine of science, Miller insists that his own account of the subjective guarantee of science should not itself be confused with ideology (CpA 9.6:105). A critique of Millers arguments on this topic constitutes one of the key articles of Cahiers tenth and final volume, Alain Badious Marque et manque: propos du zero (CpA 10.8). Badious position in this article is not a wholesale rejection of Millers own. Rather, Badious claim is that the process of suturation that Miller describes applies perfectly - though solely - to ideology. The subject as such is an ideological category that has no place in science: there is always a subject of ideology, for this is the very mark by which we recognize the latter. Place of lack; splitting of the closed: these are the concepts on whose basis we can elaborate the law governing the functioning of ideological discourse. (CpA 10.8:162). For Badiou, the maintenance of the distinction between science and ideology along Althusserian lines is imperative: to claim that the science/ideology difference could be effaced through a logic of the oscillating iteration, and to nominate a subject of science, is to preclude the possibility of conjoining, through their very disjunction, Marx and Freud (CpA 10.8:162). The precise nature of the theoretical relation between Marx and Freud, much like the conceptual relation between science and ideology, would remain unresolved in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, even as this irresolution would nonetheless provide one of the most fecund avenues for theoretical work carried out in their wake.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Sur la Dialectique matrialiste. La Pense 110 (August 1963). Reprinted in Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero, 1965. On the Materialist Dialectic. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969. ---. Freud et Lacan. La Nouvelle Critique 161-2 (December 1964 - January 1965; revised 1969). Freud and Lacan, trans. Ben Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books, 1971. ---. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation. trans. Ben Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books, 1971. ---. Trois Notes sur la thorie des discours. crits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: IMEC, 1995. Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian. The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967), ed. Franois Matheron. London: Verso, 2003. ---. Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967). Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991. Goldmann, Lucien. Ideology and writing, TLS, 28 September 1967. Hall, Stuart. The Problem of Ideology. In Marx: A Hundred Years On, ed. Betty Matthews. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983. Jameson, Fredric. Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977). Lacan, Jacques. crits (1966), trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Lichtheim, George. The Concept of Ideology. History and Theory. Vol.4, No. 2, 1965. Lukcs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: The Merlin Press, 1971. Pcheux, Michel and Michel Fichant. Sur lhistoire des sciences. Paris: Maspero, 1969. (Fascicule III in the Cours de Philosophie pour Scientifiques, 1967-68). Ranciere, Jacques. On the Theory of Ideology - Althussers Politics. In A Radical Philosophy Reader, eds. Roy Edgley and Richard Osborne. London: Verso, 1985.

Tucker, Robert C. ed.. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Notes
1. George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology, 165. 2. It should be noted that Marxs essay was only made public in 1932 when it was published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Although the term is used in various ways in Capital and other later works, the conceptgarners its most extensive treatment in this essay, famously described by Marx as his and Engels attempt to settle accounts with [their] erstwhile philosophical conscience and consequently as a document abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice. The full text is available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ 3. Marx-Engels Reader, 154. 4. Ibid., 155. 5. Substantial excerpts of this work are available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/index.htm 6. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. See as well Althussers Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses, a document circulated to Badiou and Duroux among others, and in which many of the arguments of this later essay are discernable in embryo. 7. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 162. 8. Althusser, For Marx, 223. 9. Ibid., 231 10. Ibid., 232. 11. Ibid., 233. 12. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1963/unevenness.htm.

Epistemological Break La coupure pistmologique

The concept refers to an event in the history or practice of science involving a radical break or cut (coupure) with previous, ideological conceptions. The term, inspired by GastonBachelard, was of fundamental importance to Louis Althussers reading of Marx and also resonated with the theses of Alexandre Koyr that informed Jacques Lacans considerations of science. See also:

Epistemology, Ideology, Science The epistemological break was a crucial concept in Louis Althussers rethinking of Marxism in the 1960s. In the essays collected in his volume, For Marx (1965), Althusser put forth the thesis that Marxs theoretical development could be understood in terms of a break from the Hegelian and humanist ideology of his youth that allowed him to articulate thescience of historical materialism, or at least begin to sketch its lineaments, in mature works such as Capital.1 For Althusser, the break itself was achieved as a result of Marxs own theoretical practice, which can be understood as a conceptual working-over of an ideological problematic - in Marxs case, that of bourgeois political economy - in order to convert it into a scientific one, i.e., that of historical materialism. (Althussers concept of the problematic was taken from his friend Jacques Martin; it is conceptually very similar to Michel Foucaults concept of discourse, in that it refers to the theoretical framework in which knowledge-production takes place).2 In a crucial essay of For Marx, On the Materialist Dialectic (1963), Althusser describes the mechanism of theoretical practice, and attributes the concept of the epistemological break to Gaston Bachelard: The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory: this distinction takes the form of a qualitative theoretical and historical discontinuity which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an epistemological break. This is not the place the discuss the dialectic in action in the advent of this break: that is, the labour of specific theoretical transformation which installs it in each case, which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological.3 It is important to remark that two distinct theses are operative in Althussers arguments concerning Marxism and the epistemological break. On the one hand, Althusser wants to claim that Marx personally experienced or lived something like an epistemological break, even if this was unbeknownst to Marx himself. In his introduction to For Marx, Althusser developed a schematic of Marxs works, categorizing them into Early Works, Works of the Break, Transitional Works, Mature Works. (Althusser located the break somewhere around 1845, with the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology). This was a thesis Althusser had trouble defending over time; ultimately he limited the works of Marxs full maturity to the Critique of the Gotha Programme. But it was also inconsequential to his other main argument concerning the epistemological break, namely, that the theory of dialectical materialism contained in Marxs thought itself provides the mechanism by which an epistemological break, taking one from ideology to science, can be achieved in multiple instances: I shall call theory (in inverted commas) the determinate theoretical system of a real science (its basic concepts in their more or less contradictory unity at a given time). [...] I shall call Theory (with a capital T), general theory, that is the Theory of practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory of existing theoretical practices (of the sciences), which transforms into knowledges (scientific truths) the ideological product of existing empirical practices (the concrete activity of men). This Theory is the materialist dialectic which is none other than dialectical materialism.4 It is this capital T Theory, christened dialectical materialism in Althussers work, that we can see most clearly (and perhaps ironically, given the attribution to Marx) the theory of the epistemological break inspired by Bachelards example. As Althusser himself admitted, the term epistemological break [coupure] was not to be found in Bachelards oeuvre, where one finds instead references to epistemological ruptures [ruptures]. The discrete quality of the break, or cut, introduced into the concept by Althusser lessens something of the procedural quality of Bachelards concept, even if Althussers own descriptions of theoretical practice reintroduce this element into the mix.5 In a series of books written in the 1930s, chief among them La Formation de lesprit scientifique, Bachelard described the rupture that establishes scientific thought as the result of a series of encounters with epistemological obstacles. Scientific thought always involves a break with the obstacle of immediate experience (the empirical or concrete in Althussers rubric).6 For example, the explanation of fire as oxidation rearranges the spontaneously experienced phenomena of fire itself into a rational framework that is not immediately, but only scientifically experienced. Moreover, the scientific break typically involves a rejection of the general ideas or received wisdom of the time. In this regard, the advent of theory of Relativity brokered an epochal shift in modern science. In La Philosophie du non, Bachelard was categorical: The scientific mind [esprit] can only be constituted by destroying this non-scientific mind. [...] All real progress in scientific thought necessitates a conversion. The progress of contemporary scientific thought has determined transformations in the very principles of knowledge.7 Bachelard described the ruptural quality of this experience of new scientific knowledge in emphatic terms: Above all, we must be cognizant of the fact that the new experience says no to the old experience; without that, by any measure, it is not a question of a new experience.8 We see, then, that the equivocation present in Althussers use of the epistemological break is already latent in Bachelards as well, where the sense of epistemological rupture has a world-historical scope (as in the advent of Relativity), but also refers to the discrete experience of beginning to think scientifically on an individual basis. The vacillation between the world-historical and the local or specific bearing of the concept is also evident in the influence Alexandre Koyrs theses regarding Galileo had on the editors of the Cahiers. Though Koyr himself did not use the expression epistemological break or rupture, a similar logic is in play in his volume From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. There Galileo inaugurates the modern scientific age via a revolution interior to scientific thought itself. No longer does mathematics describe a set of fixed and perfect entities; mathematics is now the science that describes an

intrinsically open-ended, and hence imperfect, process. In other words, the ideology of a closed world is transformed into the science of an infinite universe.9 If Bachelard was an essential influence on Althusser, Koyr was a more important figure for Lacan. Indeed, where Bachelard was shaped by the neoKantian rationalism of Lon Brunschvicg, with Koyr the influence of Brunschvicg was supplemented by a more sympathetic interest in Hegel, an interest he shared with Lacan. In the convergent influences of Althusser and Lacan on the Cahiers pour lAnalyse we witness something like the convergence of multiple strands in French thought concerned with the same phenomenon, the move from ideology to science. Many of the differences between Althusser and Lacan - e.g., an emphasis on theoretical practice in the former instance, versus an emphasis on discrete cuts in the latter - will be in play throughout the Cahiers itself. Moreover, the fundamental conceptual ambiguities of the concept of epistemological break - Is it world-historical, or local and specific? If it can be both, is it something that happens once and for all or that must be maintained with tenacity? - will inform many of the Cahiers central arguments. The ambiguity of the concept would also be the crucial concern of Althussers Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967-68) in which many of the normaliens affiliated with the Cahiers participated.10. The main purpose of this course was to rethink the proper relationship between philosophy and science. Althusser argues that, although philosophers cannot provide a meta-theoretical position or generalised epistemology, a generalised theory of discourse may nevertheless be possible. Regardless, however, philosophy is not to function as a doctrine of science; its task is merely to assist epistemological breaks. In this course, Althusser specifically addresses how scientists live the breaks and crises of their science both exploited crises in the sciences for apologetic, ultimately religious ends (111). The ideal reaction is to treat the contradiction of a process of the recasting [refonte] and growth of scientific practice and theory as a philosophical question: They are critical not so much of science and its practices as of the nave philosophical ideas in which they discover they had hitherto lived. They recognize that the crisis has awakened them from their dogmatism: or better, they recognize, after the event, once they are awakened to philosophy, that because they are scientists, a philosopher has always slept within them [...] They attempt to give science the philosophy it lacks: the good philosophy of science. For them, the crisis is the effect, within science, of the bad philosophy of scientists which, until then, reigned over science (113). Thus the crisis acts as a developer that shows what has remained hidden: what Althusser calls the spontaneous philosophy of the scientists (115). Finally, it is worth observing that, although the major concern of this Course was established in his previous studies, one proximate stimulus for the arguments made therein was an essay published by Althussers erstwhile professor, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, titled, Quest-ce quun problme pistmologique? (1965). In addition to many of Althussers positions being rebuttals of Desantis in this article, much of the frame of Althussers approach - including the tripartite process described above - was first set out as such in Desantis piece. Indeed, the published version of Althussers course (in French and English) omits two of his own lectures, one reprinted in a recent French edition as Du ct de la philosophie (Ecrits philosophiques et politiques II, Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995) and another that remains unpublished, titled, Sur Desanti et les pseudo-problmes de troisime espce, and which is only accessible in Althussers personal archive at IMEC in Caen, France. In addition to the text of this lecture, Althussers archive also contains a dossier containing his original, severely marked up copy of Desantis article and his correspondence with colleagues concerning its claims. In order to explain the concept of epistemological break in his 1968 overview of Structuralism in Philosophy, Franois Wahl built on Badious Althusserian formulation of the term (in his 1966 article on the (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism): The epistemological break separates an ideology from the science which proceeds in its place, which necessarily proceeds at its expense. We already know that it concerns a struggle that never ends: if the work of the break is fully accomplished once and for all, at a precise point in the history of knowledge, nevertheless theoretical practice can never have done with the effort of transforming the ideology that haunts it, and whose specular images re-establish themselves, ineluctably, in the shadow of each of our activities; a science in its naked state does not exist. Structurally, the best definition of the break would no doubt be that it substitutes for figures of repetition (combined with any number of displacements) of ideology, an authentic procedure of transformation-exposition, through rearticulation.11

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

In La Science et la vrit (CpA 1.1), Lacan directly cites Alexandre Koyr as his guide for thinking the relationship between subject and science in the modern age (CpA 1.1:7; E, 856).Though he does not directly use the expression epistemological break, Lacan nonetheless addresses the cut that establishes a science. Moreover, he does so with explicit reference to the case of Marx. Lacan cautions that the revolution that establishes a new science does not necessarily lead to a revolution in practice: An economic science inspired by Capital does not necessarily lead to its utilization as a revolutionary power, and history seems to require help from something other than predicative dialectic. Aside from this singular point, which I shall not elaborate on here, the fact is that science, if one looks at it closely, has no memory. Once constituted, it forgets the circuitous path by which it came into being; otherwise stated, it forgets a dimension of truth that psychoanalysis seriously puts to work (CpA 1.1:20 E, 869). Lacan also mentions the subjective toll of living through scientific crises, citing Georg Cantor as a first-rate tragedy led to the point of madness.

Volume 2 of the Cahiers was devoted to the question Quest-ce que la psychologie? and contained several pieces in which the relationship between science and ideology was in play (CpA 2.1CpA , 2.3). The final piece of the issue, Thomas Herberts Rflexions sur la situation thorique des sciences sociales, et, spcialement, de la psychologie sociale (CpA 2.6) explicitly develops Althussers theses in On the Materialist Dialectic in a critique of the ideological character of social psychology. Herbert (the pseudonym for MichelPcheux) begins by distinguishing Bachelardian epistemology from Kantian epistemology, the latter of which is an external reflection on the sciences rather than an assessment of its internal development (CpA 2.6:13940). Herbert identifies an epistemological break rupture that separates ideological practice from theoretical practice internal to the sciences themselves (CpA 2.6:142). But in each instance, an external work of theoretical practice can be done to make these ideological elements clear thus making an epistemological break rupture possible (CpA 2.6:160). Such is the task Herbert says must be undertaken with social psychology. Herbert invokes Galileo to make his point. Prior to the advent of Galilean science, astronomy was a mere assemblage of technical practices beholden to the dominant ideology of the epoch. The rupture that establishes science makes the vagabondage of these ideological elements retrospectively clear (CpA 2.6:161). In his unpublished contribution to Althussers Philosophy Course for Scientists, Franois Regnault argued that epistemological breaks [coupures] must be distinguished from the infra-ideological and infra-scientific ruptures that precede and follow them.12 In his La Pense du Prince (CpA 6.2), Regnault discusses how Machiavelli stood on the cusp of making an epistemological break in the science of politics. Machiavellis value lies in his having created a place for a future science, rather than that science itself. Nobody is capable of inhabiting [nicher] a break, not Descartes, not Machiavelli, not us, not I - one must be either before or after it. Thus in order to assign such a break to Machiavelli, one could also take up the formula M. Canguilhem applies to Galileo: he was in the true, he did not say the true (CpA 6.2:37).13 Machiavellis materialist politics, as it stands, remains an epistemological break project, the faithful philosophy of a science yet to come, the owl risen too soon, a monster. The problematic of the epistemological break informs the Cercle dpistmologies questions to Michel Foucault, which open volume 9, Gnalogie des sciences. In his reply, Foucault implicitly abandons the term episteme found in Les Mots et les choses [The Order of Things] (CpA 9.2). He argues that investigations into epistemologyshould be supplemented with a theory of discursive formations. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, a volume largely inspired by his exchanges with the Cercle and other critics, Foucault discusses epistemological break thresholds, but again situates these within a wider field of discursive statements.In a 1967 interview with Raymond Bellour, Foucault had said, There remains [] between Althusser and myself, an obvious difference: he employs the term epistemological break in relation to Marx, while I affirm that Marx does not represent such a break.14 In her piece, Mtaphysique de la physique de Galile (CpA 9.9), Judith Miller reads Galileo with regard to the concept of the epistemological break. Like Regnault in his discussion of Machiavelli (CpA 6.2), Miller is concerned to understand the coupure as something that cannot be experienced in itself, but that divides experience into a before and an after. Volume 9 also contains Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure (CpA 9.6), a crucial text at the source of many of the debates within the Cahiers. In this text, Miller presents the epistemological break that establishes a scientific discourse that is supposedly immune to ideology in terms of the relation between suture and foreclosure: [H]ow, then, is such a discourse possible, a discourse which only takes orders from itself, a flat discourse, without unconscious, adequate to its object? [...] This closing of scientific discourse should not be confused with the suture of non-scientific discourse, because it actually expels lack [elle met le manque la porte], reduces its central exteriority, disconnects it from every other Scene. Thought from within the field it circumscribes, this closing [fermeture] will be given the name:closure [clture]. But the limit of this circumscription has a density, it has an exterior; in other words, scientific discourse is not marked [frapp] by a simple lack -rather the lack of a lack is also a lack (CpA 9.6:102). Miller continues: Double negation confers positivity to its field, but at the periphery of this field one must acknowledge the structure that makes it possible, and from which its development is nevertheless not independent. The lack of the lack leaves in every scientific discourse the place of the miscognition, of the ideology that accompanies it, without being intrinsic to it: a scientific discourse as such includes no utopic element. We need to envisage [figurer] two superposed spaces, without quilting point [point de capiton], without slippage (lapsus) from the one to the other. The enclosure proper to science therefore operates a redistribution [rpartition] between a closed field, on the one hand, of which one perceives no limit if one considers it from the inside, and a foreclosed space. Foreclosure is the other side of closure. This term will suffice to indicate that every science is structured like a psychosis: the foreclosed returns under the form of the impossible (CpA 9.6:102-3) Miller ultimately locates the complex relationship between suture and foreclosure in the nodal point of the epistemological break itself: It is in fact the epistemological break that we rediscover [here], but by approaching it from its exterior side we must recognise the privilege and the novel scientific status of a discourse of overdetermination which constitutes its field at the exterior limit of all science in general, and of which the theoretical as well as practical (therapeutic or political) injunction is given by the Freudian Wo es war, soll ich werden, which for us summons the scientific subject to pull itself together [qui convoque notre sens le sujet scientifique se ressaisir] (CpA 9.6/103). In his Marque et manque: propos de zero (CpA 10.8), Alain Badiou will criticise the intrication that Miller establishes between suture and foreclosure in this instance, arguing instead that science excludes the institutional operator of [ideological] recapture - the notion of Truth; proceeding instead according to the concept of a mechanism of production (CpA 10.8:150).

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Sur la dialectique matrialiste. La Pense, August 1963. Reprinted in Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero, 1965. On the Materialist Dialectic. In For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969. Online at http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65NB.html. ---. Philosophy Course for Scientists (1967) in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990. ---. Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock. London: NLB, 1976. Bachelard, Gaston. Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique. Paris: Alcan, 1934. The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon, 1985. ---. La Formation de lesprit scientifique: Contribution une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective. Paris: Vrin, 1938. The Formation of the Scientific Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAllester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen, 2002. ---. La Philosophie du non: Essai dune philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris: Corti, 1940. The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind, trans. G.C. Waterston. New York: Orion, 1968. Balibar, Etienne From Bachelard to Althusser: The Concept of the Epistemological Break. Economy and Society 7:3 (1978). Canguilhem, Georges. Dialectique et philosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 66 (1963): 441-452. ---. La Signification de luvre de Galile et la leon de lhomme. Archives Internationales dHistoire des Sciences 17: 68-69 (July-December 1964). Reprinted in his tudes dhistoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Vrin, 1968. Canguilhem, Georges. Review of Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Critique 242 (1967). The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito, trans. C. Porter. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Canguilhem, Georges. Idologie et rationalit dans lhistoire des sciences de la vie: Nouvelles tudes dhistoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Vrin, 1977. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988. Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. La philosophie silencieuse, ou critique des philosophies de la science. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Dews, Peter. Althusser, Structuralism, and the French epistemological break Tradition. In Althusser: A Critical Reader, ed. Gregory Elliott. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Foucault, Michel. LArchologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1982. Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvain Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996. Lecourt, Dominique. Marxism and epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1975. Milner, Jean-Claude. LOeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Paris: Seuil 1995. Pcheux, Michel and Michel Fichant. Sur lhistoire des sciences. Paris: Maspero, 1969. Wahl, Franois. La Philosophie entre lavant et laprs du structuralisme, in Wahl ed., Quest-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes
1. Marxs theoretical revolution was precisely to base his theory on a new element after liberating it from its old element: the element of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy, in Feuerbachs Philosophical Manifestoes (1960) in For Marx, 47. 2. Ibid., 32, 253-4. 3. Ibid., 167-8. 4. Ibid., 168. 5. Cf. Etienne Balibar, On the Concept of the Epistemological Break (1977). Balibar notes that Bachelards term was rupture, and not coupure. Balibar also makes this case in this essay that Althussers retractions of his erstwhile theoreticism concerning the epistemological break (cf. Elements of Self-Criticism) were predicated on Althussers misunderstanding his own project. Rather than having attempted a general theory of science grounded in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, Althusser had articulated and defended the being in the true of historical materialism as a science. Moreover, he did so in such a way as to understand the essential role that ideology plays in social formations, including the social formations that gave rise to Marxism itself. 6. Though Bachelard is Althussers chief reference for the epistemological break, the epistemology that he develops for Marx in On the Materialist Dialectic is equally if not more indebted to

Spinoza. Cf. Althussers comment in Reading Capital where he describes Spinozas thought as a philosophy of the opacity of the immediate, 16. This theoretical consonance between Spinozism and Bachelardian epistemology is in fact historically grounded in that Spinozism was a itself crucial element of French epistemology, from Brunschvicg to Bachelard. 7. Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophie due non, 8-9. 8. Ibid., 9. Note that, in French, lexprience is the word for experience in the Anglophone sense of the term, but also for experiment as in scientific experiment. Bachelards writings on the philosophy of science make the most of this dual sense in the French context. 9. Cf. Jean-Claude Milner, LOeuvre claire, where the difference between Bachelard and Koyr precisely on this question of the discreteness or singularity of the rupture is emphasized. In his work, Bachelard elaborates myriad examples, and consequently various forms, of epistemological break rupture; whereas in Koyr there is only one division, on cut, that between science. 10. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists 11. Wahl, La Philosophie entre lavant et laprs du structuralisme, 381-382. Wahl refers here to Badious Le (Re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique, Critique 240 (May 1967), 450-51. 12. See the introduction to Michel Fichant and Michel Pcheux, Sur lhistoire des sciences. 13. Georges Canguilhem, La signification de luvre de Galile et la leon de lhomme (1946), in Idem., tudes dhistoire et de la philosophie de la science, Paris: Vrin, 46. Canguilhem cites Koyr for this assessment of Galileo. 14. Foucault, The Discourse of History, Foucault Live, 21.

Structural Causality La causalit structurale

A key concept in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, inherited from Louis Althussers account of the specific interaction of structures and their elements. See also:

Cause, Lack, Structure Louis Althusser attempted to extract the Marxist theory of society from its Hegelian dialectical origins by reformulating it as a theory of a structured totality, composed of economic, social and ideological levels. In Section II of his controversial 1964 essay Marxisme et humanisme, Althusser showed that the Feuerbachian and Hegelian principles behind Marxs1844 Manuscripts were different to those of his mature work Capital.1 On the Hegelian schema history is the alienation and production of reason in unreason, of the true man in the alienated man. The alienation of labour and the loss of the essence of man produces history, and at the end of history, this man, having become inhuman objectivity, has merely to re-grasp as subject his own essence alienated in property, religion and the State to become total man, true man.2 According to Althusser, Marx. replaced the old postulates (empiricism/idealism of the subject, empiricism/idealism of the essence) which were the basis not only for idealism but also for preMarxist materialism, by a historico-dialectical materialism of praxis. For Althusser the shift to a theory of the different specific levels of human practice was the key to the validity of the Marxist view of society. Taking up Marxs analysis in the Introduction to the Grundrisse of the coexistence of the levels of production, distribution and consumption,3 he contended that social contradiction was inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which is found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances t governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be calledoverdetermined in principle.4 In LObjet du Capital in Lire le Capital (1965), Althusser becomes preoccupied the problem of how to think the inter-determination of structures. With what concept are we to think the determination of either an element or a structure by a structure?5 This problem is connected with another methodological problem: if the whole is already structured and all action is caught up in the movement of its specific mechanisms, how is it possible to present the structure as such? If we are already inside pre-structured relations, how is it possible to gain a vantage point on these structures? These questions lead Althusser to deal with the problem of structural causality. If, according to Marx, the economic relations of production are determinant in the last instance, how is this determination to be thought? The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structures metonymic causality on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects6 In a footnote, Althusser refers to Jacques-Alain Millers Action de la structure (CpA 9.6), which Miller had distributed as a paper in 1964 before publishing in volume 9 of the CahiersMetonymic causality, Althusser writes, is an expression Jacques-Alain Miller has introduced to characterize a form of structural causality registered in Freud by Jacques Lacan. The problematic of structural causality is of central importance for Millers work in the Cahiers, as well as for other contributors such as Thomas Herbert [Michel Pcheux] and AlainBadiou. Badiou dwells at length on the problem of structural causality in his 1967 review of Althussers work, Le (Re)commencement de la matrialisme dialectique. For him, the representation of structural causality within the social system is the key to the problem. Insofar as the economy is determinant, it nevertheless remains invisible, not beingpresented in the constellation of instances, only represented. The fundamental problem of all structuralism is that of a term bearing a double function which determines the belonging of the other terms to the structure insofar as it is itself excluded from them by a specific operation that makes it figure only under the species of its representant (its lieu-tenant [or placeholder], to take up a concept of Jacques Lacan). It is the immense merit of Lvi-Strauss to have recognised, in the still mixed form of the Signifierzero, the true importance of this question.7 Badious solution to the problem of structural causality is different from Millers, and their divergence on this theme yields one of the overarching problematics of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse.8

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

In La Suture (CpA 1.3), Jacques-Alain Miller presents a psychoanalytic account of the alternating relation of exclusion and representation that a subject has with the chain of its discourse (CpA 1.3:39; trans. 25-26). The subject figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a placeholder [tenant-lieu]. However, while it is lacking there, it is not purely and simply absent. The general relation of lack to the structure of which it is

an element [] implies the position of a taking-the-place-of (39). Thus suture - Millers term for this relation - can be understood as a form of structural causality, where an excluded element is metaphorically and metonymically represented by means of a stand-in or placeholder. Millers emphasis on the representation of a structurally excluded element by means of a placeholder is consistent with Althussers conception of structural causality, in which the determinant instance of the economy cannot be presented as such, but is rather represented inside the structure by a particular, displaced representative. Where Suture expounds the formal mechanism of representation and exclusion, Millers other piece in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, Action de la structure (CpA 9.6) situates this mechanism within the field of social and linguistic structure. Structure can be minimally defined as that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes (CpA 9.6/95). Insofar as a structure lays out places to be occupied, it may be said to analytically contain a virtual dimension, alongside the actual plane in which it is incarnated. This permits a distinction between a structuring structure and a structured structure. The subject that emerges out of this primary process of structuration is first of all nothing but a support, a subjected subject. The relation of the subject to the structure is mediated through an imaginary function of misrecognition, involving representations that respond to the fundamental absence in the structuring process, and compensate for the production of lack (96). These representations exist only in order to dissimulate the reason for their existence. This distortion of the structure by the subjectivity it has produced in turn leads to an overdetermination of experience by the structuring process. The production of the lack of the cause in the space of its effects coincides with the operation of suture. Miller suggests that every structure includes a lure which takes the place of the lack, but which is at the same time the weakest link of the given sequence, a vacillating point which belongs only in appearance to the plane of actuality. Although the subject is caught in a constitutive misrecognition of its own position, it is possible to produce a theoretical conversion of perspective that reveals these vacillating points for what they are: points at which experiential, structured space intersects with the transcendental space of structuration. Miller contends that this conception affords possibilities for political transformation, insofar as these vacillating, utopic points indicate the weak links of social and political structures. The misrecognitions of subjects can be examined according to the logic of their displacements. Structural causes may be metaphorised in discourse, but their underlying metonymic causality can still be penetrated. The necessary condition for the functioning of structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the cause (CpA 9.6); but nevertheless, it is possible to ascend by means of theory to the level of structural determinations, and to target from there possible sites of practical intervention at the level of actual discourse. Thomas Herberts Remarques pour une thorie gnrale des idologies (CpA 9.5) can be read as a more concrete, directly politicized version of the view of structural causality presented by Miller. Herbert makes a fundamental distinction between two types of ideology, the second of which operates according to a logic of structural causality. Type A ideologies have an empiricist form in that their goal is to match significations to a putative reality, whereas type B ideologies follow an immanent law of organization adhering to a speculative-phraseological form that establishes coherence in advance. Whereas an empirically grounded ideology can be discarded by reference to a putative real which reveals its inadequacy, a type B speculative ideology determines what is admissible, or what can even make sense, in advance (CpA 9.5:78-79). Herbert claims that ideologies of the speculative form are situated at the level of syntax, that is, in the relation of signifier to signifier, rather than in the semantic adjustment of signifier to signified. Speculative ideologies organize a syntactical allocation of places for subjects that is constitutivelyforgotten by those subjects. Let us say briefly that the putting into place of subjects refers to the economic instance of the relations of production, and the forgetting of this putting into place to the political instance (CpA 9.5:83). Taking up the relationship between (semantic)metaphor and (syntactical) metonymy in Lacanian thought, Herbert shows how metonymic relations in one domain, e.g., the economic, become metaphorically displaced into, and as a consequence establish relations with, other domains, such as the political or the ideological. For example, in capitalism, economic relations are effectively metonymical, its constitutive terms salary, worker, contract, boss, etc. - only making sense in their differential relationship to one another. Through the very organization of the economic field of production, however, these metonymic sequences become condensed into semantmes, units of meaning, displacing these meanings into the adjacent field of the political, wherein they constitute a politico-juridical axiomatic whose own internal coherence blinds it to its economic origins. The reciprocal functioning of these two levels is grounded in the primacy or the position in dominance of the metonymic sequence: As the horizontal articulation of ideological elements according to a syntactic structure, the metonymic effect produces a rationalization-automisation at all structural levels, each of which will now appear endowed with internal coherence. In this way the subjects identification to the political and ideological structures that constitute subjectivity as the origin of what the subject says and does (the norms he states and practices) is produced: this subjective illusionthrough which, to use a phenomenological expression, the consciousness of being in a situation is constituted hides from the agent his own position in the structure (CpA 9.5:88). Alain Badious La Subversion infinitsimale (CpA 9.8) and Marque et manque: propos du zro (CpA 10.8) attempt to prise the Althusserian problematic of the representation of structural causality away from Millers Lacanian interpretation. In Le (Re)commencement du matrialisme dialectique Badiou implicitly concurred with Miller that the identification of the determining instance in a structure can only be achieved by getting out of the structured.9 On this problem, J.A. Miller has given an exposition to which reference will be essential. We will try to show elsewhere that 1) the usage extraordinarily ingenious - of the construction of number by Frege to illustrate the problem of structural causality is epistemologically inadequate; and 2) that one cannot think the logic of the signifier as such (as signifier in general) except by redoubling the structure of metaphysics.10 Badiou carries out these two tasks in Marque et manque. He identifies an alternating chain in which what is known as the progress of science consists (CpA 10.8:173). However, the action or motor of this progress is science alone. It is not because it is open that science has causeto deploy itself (although openness governs the possibility of this deployment); it is because ideology is incapable of being satisfied with this openness. Forging the impracticable image of a closed discourse and exhorting science to submit to it, ideology sees its own order returned to it in the unrecognizable form of the new concept; the reconfiguration through which science, treating its ideological interpellation as material, ceaselessly displaces the breach that it opens in the former. Millers account of the reciprocal interpenetration of structure and ideological misrecognition must therefore be replaced by a more fundamental opposition between scientific progress and ideology.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969.

Althusser, Louis, and tienne Balibar. Reading Capital [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970. Badiou, Alain, Le (Re)commencement de la matrialisme dialectique, Critique 23/240, May 1967. Feltham, Oliver. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008. Lvi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss [1950], trans. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge, 1987. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973. Wahl, Franois. Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?, in Quest-ce que le structuralisme? 5. Philosophie. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1973.

Notes
1. Althusser, Marxism and Humanism, in For Marx,223-27. 2. Ibid, 226. 3. The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself [], but over the other moments as well []. A definite production determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments. Marx, Grundrisse, 99. Althusser writes that the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction can rightly be regarded as the Discourse on Method of the new philosophy founded by Marx. In fact, it is the only systematic text by Marx which contains, in the form of an analysis of the categories and method of political economy, the means with which to establish a theory of scientific practice, i.e. a theory of the conditions of the process of knowledge, which is the object of Marxist philosophy. Althusser, Reading Capital, 86. 4. Althusser, Contradiction and Overdetermination, in For Marx, 101. 5. The Object of Capital, in Reading Capital, 188. 6. Ibid, 188-89. 7. Badiou, Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matrialisme, 457. The reference to LviStrauss is to Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 63-64. 8. For an account of Millers and Badious theories of structural causality in the Cahiers pour lAnalyse, see Franois Wahl, Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?, 115-126. 9. Badiou, Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matrialisme, 459. 10. Ibid, 457.

Jacques Derrida (19302004)

Jacques Derrida ranks among the most important thinkers in recent French intellectual history, his name inextricably linked to the concept he coined: deconstruction. The author of numerous works, Derrida was a world-renowned figure at the time of his death in 2004. Born and raised in Algeria, Derrida was expelled from his high school in 1942 by a Vichy-backed administration enforcing its anti-Semitic quotas. He came to France in the late 1940s, and gained admission to the cole Normale Suprieure in 1951 after pursuing studies at the lyce Louis-le-Grand. Though he always occupied a peculiar position within French academia due to the idiosyncrasy of his methods, Derrida found immense success in the Anglophone world, teaching at multiple universities in the US, and eventually holding a position at the University of California, Irvine from 1986 until his death. Through a series of works published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Derrida pointed to the aporias of structuralism as a theoretical paradigm, paving the way for a poststructuralist engagement with the indeterminacy of language and signification as such. Despite the literary style of much of his writing, Derridas work was thoroughly philosophical as well, pursuing a critique of the metaphysics of presence and the predominance of logocentrism in the history of Western thought. Inspired by Heidegger, with whose project Derrida remained critically engaged for much of his career, Derridas later work witnessed several turns, from an engagement with questions of politics and ethics, to religion, to an investigation of animality shortly before his death. While never a member of the Cercle dpistmologie, and despite his critical distance from psychoanalysis, Derrida was an intriguing figure to the editors of the Cahiers due to his early critiques of Husserlian phenomenology. Derrida produced a masters thesis on Husserl in 1954, under the direction of Louis Althusser, and in 1962 he published a translation of Husserls The Origins of Geometry, which included a long introduction that was approvingly cited in the Cahiers. In 1964, Derrida became an instructor at the cole Normale Suprieure and his contribution to volume four was drawn from his teaching. His assessment of Lvi-Strauss, with its critique of the Rousseauist distinction between nature and culture and its claims for an operative arche-writing that is at once anterior to speech and a condition of all science, would go on to greater fame after its inclusion in Derridas major work Of Grammatology.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

Jacques Derrida, Avertissement, CpA 4.Introduction Jacques Derrida, Nature, Culture, Ecriture (de Lvi-Strauss Rousseau), CpA 4.1

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Le Problme de la gense dans la philosophie de Husserl (1954). Paris: PUF, 1990. The Problem of Genesis in Husserls Philosophy, trans. Marian Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Edmund Husserl. LOrigine de la gometrie, traduction et introduction de Jacques Derrida. Paris: PUF, 1962. Edmund Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. La Voix et le phnomne. Paris: PUF, 1967. "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Of Grammatologie, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Lcriture et la diffrence, Paris: Seuil, 1967. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. La Carte postale: De Socrate Freud et au-del. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Jacques Lacan (19011981)

Arguably the most important, and certainly the most controversial, theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis since Freud, Jacques Lacan was the foremost influence on the Cercle dpistmologie and the key inspiration for the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. Born in Paris in 1901, Lacan pursued studies in psychiatry and developed close ties with the surrealist movement in the interwar years. Following upon his doctoral work on paranoid psychosis and its relationship to personality, Lacan made his first crucial contribution to psychoanalysis in 1936 with his presentation on the mirror stage of child development and its formative role in the constitution of the ego. In the early 1950s, Lacan began holding a series of seminars centred on a return to Freud. Lacans aim was to develop a deliberate alternative to the ego psychology that had become the predominant interpretation of Freud in AngloAmerican circles, and which conceived of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice designed to assist the ego in its adaptation to the social and material world. Inspired by similar projects in linguistics and anthropology, Lacan undertook a structural reading of Freud that emphasized the primacy of the signifier over the signified and that relegated the ego to the domain of the imaginary, emphasizing its distinction from the subject of the unconscious. His distinction of the subject from the ego or consciousness, accounts for Lacans status as one of the most important theorists of subjectivity in recent European thought. Lacans analytic practices resulted in his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963 and the transfer of his seminar from the Saint-Anne Hospital to the cole Normale Suprieure following the invitation of Louis Althusser. Lacans first seminar in this venue, held in January 1964 and later published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, was attended by Jacques-Alain Miller and other future editors of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse. A turning point in Lacans own intellectual trajectory, this seminar emphasized the constitutively split nature of the subject and inspired the structural investigation of subjectivity that would be the dominant theme of the Cahiers. In Science and Truth, a document which served as the inaugural lesson of his 1965-66 seminar, the inaugural article in the Cahiers, and the capstone essay of Lacans crits, Lacan addressed the relationship between science and psychoanalysis. Arguing that the subject of the latter was also the subject of the former in the modern era, Lacan emphasized psychoanalysiss peculiar status as a practice historically conditioned by science and yet capable of pointing to the constitutive ignorance of truth in scientific discourse, an ignorance that makes science as such possible. Lacans formulations concerning the function of truth as cause, and the distinction of truth from knowledge, laid the groundwork for the debates within the Cahiers over the relationship between science and ideology and the function of the subject within each discourse. A source of the Cahierss engagement with formalisation, Lacan was inspired by the Cahiers in turn, pursuing an ever more rigorous engagement with formalism and topology until his death in 1981. In addition to Lacans own writings and seminars, the Cahiers pour lAnalyse occupy a crucial position in the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a phenomenon which transcends the contributions and intentions signified by the proper name at its source.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

Jacques Lacan, La Science et la vrit, CpA 1.1 Jacques Lacan, Rponses des tudiants en philosophie sur lobjet de la psychanalyse, CpA 3.1

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crits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. crits, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Hlose Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Le Sminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Seminar IX: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977. De la psychose paranoaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalit (1932). Paris: Seuil, 1975. Seminar XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (19641965), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript. Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis (19651966), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript. Autres crits. Paris: Seuil, 2001. Links to comprehensive bibliographies of Lacans writings, in French and in English, can be found at http://www.lacan.com/bibliographies.htm.

Serge Leclaire (19241994)

One of the first disciples of Jacques Lacan, Serge Leclaire was a prominent French psychoanalyst who played a special role in the production of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse by allowing his seminar to be published there and providing a critical perspective on the exploration of psychoanalysis underway in the journal. Born in Strasbourg with the surname Liebschutz to an agnostic Jewish family, his father obtained false papers with the name Leclaire during the Second World War. During his studies of psychiatry, Leclaire met a Hindu monk who introduced him to the writings of the psychoanalyst Franoise Dolto. Shortly thereafter Leclaire entered into analysis with Lacan at the Salptrire hospital in Paris. Leclaire was Lacans close ally through the many ruptures within the French psychoanalytic movement, and would eventually serve as the founder of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the experimental University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes in 1969. Leclaires contributions to Lacanian psycho analysis and the inscriptive role of the signifier on the body. Within the Cahiers, his pieces caution against a wholesale appropriation of psychoanalytic discourse that obscures the unique relation between analyst and analysand. Moreover, while making use of Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milners contributions to Lacanian theory, Leclaire argues that what is lost in their analyses is a sense of what makes some signifiers more prominent than others, i.e., what distinguishes ones that pertain to the discourse of the unconscious from those that do not. In an extensive reading of the Wolf Man case in volume five, Leclaire warns against the error of making the signifier no more than a letter open to all meanings, and argues that a signifier can be named as such only to the extent that the letter that constitutes one of its slopes necessarily refers back to a movement of the body. It is this elective anchoring of a letter (gramma) in a movement of the body that constitutes the unconscious element, the signifier properly speaking. This emphasis on the inscriptive role of signifiers is also evident in Leclaires books Psychanalyser (1968) and On tue un enfant (1975), the former of which played a key role in communicating the novelty of the Lacanian intervention in psychoanalysis to a wider audience. His contribution to the Cahiers pour lAnalyse was decisive not only because it granted the imprimatur of a practicing analyst, but also because it actively explored the relation of psychoanalysis to other discursive frameworks and practices central to the journals concerns without losing sight of the specificity of clinical practice.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse

Serge Leclaire, Lanalyste sa place?, CpA 1.4 Serge Leclaire, Compter avec la psychanalyse (Sminaire de lENS, 1965-1966), CpA 1.5 Serge Leclaire, Note sur lobjet de la psychanalyse, CpA 2.5 Serge Leclaire, Compter avec la psychanalyse (Sminaire de lENS, 1965-66), CpA 3.6 Serge Leclaire, Les lments en jeu dans une psychanalyse ( propos de lHomme aux loups), CpA 5.1 Serge Leclaire, Compter avec la psychanalyse (Sminaire de lENS, 1966-67), CpA 8.6

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Psychanalyser. Paris: Seuil, 1968. Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Dmasquer le rel. Paris: Seuil, 1971. On tue un enfant, Paris: Seuil,1975. A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissim and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Rompre les charmes. Paris: Inter ditions, 1981. Le Pays de lautre. Paris: Seuil, 1991. tat des lieux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991.> Demeures de lailleurs: 1954-1993. Paris: Arcanes, 1996. Ecrits pour la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1996. Principes dune psychothrapie des psychoses. Paris: Fayard, 1999. dipe Vincennes. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

Jean-Claude Milner (1941)

Currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Universit de Paris-VII, and a former director of the Collge Internationale de Philosophie (19982001), Jean-Claude Milner has pursued a diverse intellectual career comprised of academic contributions to linguistics, critical engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as, more recently, a series of essays concerning anti-Semitism in European history and culture. For the past several years, Milner has held a seminar devoted to this theme at the Institut dtudes levinassiennes in Paris. In 1960, after completing his khgne at the lyce Henri-IV, Milner entered the cole Normale Suprieure, where he took courses with Louis Althusser and developed a close friendship with JacquesAlain Miller, a friendship that would be instrumental in the founding and direction of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse several years later. Among the members of theCercle dpistmologie, for which he served as secretary, Milner was notable for his special interest in linguistics. In addition to following the teaching of Jacques Lacan, Milner also displayed an early engagement with the writings of Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom would secure for Milner a short term postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in 1966. The exposure to Noam Chomskys work was formative for Milner, who translated Chomskys Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) into French in 1971. In many ways faithful to Lacans original teaching despite these heterogeneous influences, his work also displays an engagement with Anglophone philosophy of science (e.g., Popper and Lakatos) that accounts for Milners unique perspective on the Lacanian enterprise; see in particular Milners LOeuvre claire (1995). Like many of the normaliens involved in the Cahiers, Milner experienced May 1968 as a cataclysmic personal and political event. In the years that followed, he was an active participant along with Jacques-Alain Miller in the Maoist group the Gauche Prolterienne. Milner has recently published his reflections on these years, which contrast greatly with those of Alain Badiou, in a book titled LArrogance du prsent (2009). Despite their current differences, much of Milners work in the wake of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse concerning the nature and function of names was instrumental for Badious project well as for many others inspired by Lacans reconfiguration of the modern subject. In his works LAmour de la langue (1978) and Les Noms indistincts (1983), Milner developed the conception of language to be found in his most significant contribution to the Cahiers, Le Point du signifiant. In this article, a reading of Platos Sophist, Milner suggested that the proper name functions as the mark of an errant negativity, or non-being, that alternately serves as a function or term in discursive sequences. With his emphasis on the essentially vacillating and errant nature of subjectivity, Milner negotiated a path between the positions in the journal represented by Miller and Badiou.

In the Cahiers pour lAnalyse:

Jean-Claude Milner, Avertissement, CpA 2:Introduction Jean-Claude Milner, Avertissement, CpA 3:Introduction Jean-Claude Milner, Le point du signifiant, CpA 3.5 Jean-Claude Milner, Grammaire dAragon, CpA 7.2 Jacques-Alain Miller & Jean-Claude Milner, Avertissement: Nature de limpense, CpA 8:Introduction

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Arguments linguistiques. Paris: Mame, 1973. De la syntaxe linterprtation. Paris: Seuil, 1978. LAmour de la langue. Paris: Seuil 1978 [republished by Verdier, 2009]. For the Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield. New York: Macmillan, 1990. Ordres et raisons des langues. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Les Noms indistincts. Paris: Seuil, 1983. [Republished by Verdier, 2007]. De lcole. Paris: Seuil, 1984. [Republished by Verdier 2009]. Dtections fictives. Paris: Seuil, 1985. Dire le vers (with Franois Regnault). Paris: Seuil, 1987. [Republished by Verdier, 2008]. Introduction une science du langage. Paris: Seuil, 1989. Constat. Paris: Verdier, 1992. Archologie dun chec: 1950-1993. Paris: Seuil, 1993. LOeuvre claire: Lacan, la science et la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Extract translated as The Doctrine of Science, trans. Oliver Feltham. Umbr(a): Science and Truth 1 (2000): 33-63. Le Salaire de lidal. Paris: Seuil, 1997. Le Triple du plaisir. Paris: Verdier, 1997.

Mallarm au tombeau. Paris: Verdier, 1999. Constats [contains Constat, Le Triple du plaisir, and Mallarm au tombeau]. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. Le Priple structurale: figures et paradigme. Paris: Seuil, 2002. [Republished by Verdier, 2008]. Existe-il une vie intellectuelle en France? Paris: Verdier, 2002. Le Pas philosophique de Roland Barthes. Paris: Verdier, 2002. Les Penchants criminels de lEurope dmocratique. Paris: Verdier, 2003. Voulez-vous tre valu? (with Jacques-Alain Miller). Paris: Grasset, 2004. La Politique des choses. Paris: Navarin, 2005. Le Juif de savoir. Paris: Grasset, 2006. LArrogance du prsent: regards sur une dcennie. Paris. Grasset, 2009.