Moment of Truth-the Newman reference : 26th November 1995 : Philip Boxer

Note

Originally circulated as a working paper during the London Circle’s (now the London Society of the New Lacanian School) seminars on Jacques Lacan’s ‘Science and Truth’. It was published in the January Issue 4 of the Newsletter of the London Circle of European Psychoanalysis, 1996. For Julia Evans, this paper was foundational to the development of her position within ‘legislation’. Julia Evans (probably 2000)

Available from www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Lacan (19651201 Science and Truth) or

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230819229_Moment_of_Truth_The_Newman_Reference

References

Boxer, In Seminar XI, Lacan asks what are the fundamentals of psychoanalysis through asking what grounds it as praxis. In searching for an answer to this question, he introduces two terms between which to hold the question: the terms of science and religion.

In approaching these terms, Lacan considers the nature of research. While dissociating psychoanalysis from the form of research in which the phrase ‘you would not seek me if you had not already found me’ is used, he nevertheless comments on the ‘hermeneutic demand’ which emerges “as it were, beneath the feet of whoever finds” [i].

[i] p7, Seminar XI, Chapter 1: Excommunication

See Session of Seminar XI Excommunication : 15^th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19640115)

P7-8 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, Indeed, there are in the field of so-called scientific research two domains that can quite easily be recognized, that in which one seeks, and that in which one finds.

Curiously enough, this corresponds to a fairly well defined frontier between what may and may not qualify as science. Furthermore, there is no doubt some affinity between the research that seeks and the religious register. In the religious register, the phrase is often used— You would not seek me had not already found me. The already found is already behind, but stricken by something like oblivion. Is it not, then, a complaisant endless search that is then opened up?

If the search concerns us here, it is by virtue of those elements of this debate that are established at the level of what we nowadays call the human sciences. Indeed, in these human sciences, one sees emerging, as it were, beneath the feet of whoever finds, what I will call the hermeneutic demand, which is precisely that which seeks—which seeks the ever new and the never exhausted signification, but one threatened with being trampled under foot by him who finds.

***

Boxer, The way of developing signification offered by hermeneutics “is confused with what analysts call interpretation. Interpretation is not hermeneutics, although hermeneutics makes ready use of interpretation” [ii] .

[ii] p8, Seminar XI, Chapter 1: Excommunication

See Session of Seminar XI Excommunication : 15^th January 1964 : Jacques Lacan at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19640115)

P8 of Alan Sheridan’s translation, Now, we analysts are interested in this hermeneutics, because the way of developing signification offered by hermeneutics is confused, in many minds, with what analysis calls interpretation. It so happens that, although this interpretation cannot in any way be conceived in the same way as the aforementioned hermeneutics, hermeneutics, on the other hand, makes ready use of interpretation. In this respect, we see, at least, a corridor of communication between psycho-analysis and the religious register. We shall come back to this in due course.

Before allowing psycho-analysis to call itself a science, therefore, we shall require a little more.

***

Boxer, This is one thing that the Newman reference casts light on.

The relationship to science lies through what specifies science: “having an object”. If science is specified by an object of experiment, what is the object of psychoanalysis? The subject is at “the nexus [noeud] of difference”: “a split between a notion of reality that includes psychic reality, and another that makes reality the correlate of the perception-consciousness system”. The reality principle is “the strain of experience sanctioned by the subject of science”, so that “the subject upon which we operate in psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science”.[iii] But if the subject of science is the necessary condition for the practice of psychoanalysis, what is the sufficient condition? What is constitutive of the object of psychoanalysis?

[iii] pp 5-7, Science and Truth

See Science and Truth (Opening session of Seminar XIII) : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P5-7 of Bruce Fink’s translation,

Fink p6, One thing is certain: if the subject is truly there, at the nexus [noeud (JE, or knot)] of that difference, all humanist references become superfluous in science, the subject cutting them short.

Fink p5, The reality principle accordingly loses the discordance that supposedly characterizes it in Freud’s work when, due to a juxtaposition of texts, it is split between a notion of reality that includes psychic reality and another that makes psychic reality the correlate of the perception-consciousness system. (JE, see The Project for a Scientific Psychology (Entwurf) : 23^rd & 25^th September & 5^th October 1895 : Sigmund Freud, this site /3 Sigmund Freud (September 1895 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

Fink p6, The reality principle must be read as it is in fact designated: as the strain of experience sanctioned by the subject of science.

***

Boxer, The difference to science emerges through the difference between the enunciated and the enunciation: the impact of the subject who speaks. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem shows the impossibility of any theory saying everything. This remainder speaks the impossibility of the suturing of the subject of science, and is taken by Lacan as the point of difference: whereas science is defined by “the deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject”, psychoanalysis is defined by the opposite: the internal exclusion – the extimacy – of the subject from its object.” [iv] [iv] pp9-10, Science and Truth

See Science and Truth (Opening session of Seminar XIII) : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan, on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P10 of Fink’s translation, I will indicate further along how modern logic is situated (cf. the third example below). It is indisputably the strictly determined consequence of an attempt to suture the subject of science, and Gödel’s last theorem shows that this attempt fails, meaning that the subject in question remains the correlate of science, but an antinomial* correlate since science turns out to be defined by the deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject.

* From A.I. overview, “Antinomial” (or more commonly antinomian) describes beliefs that reject laws or moral rules, particularly the idea in Christian theology that faith and grace free believers from the need to follow the moral law, while in philosophy, it relates to antinomy, a conflict between two seemingly valid principles, like Kant’s famous contradictions. While “antinomial” itself is an older, rarer form (meaning “of or relating to antinomianism”), “antinomian” refers to a person holding these views, and “antinomy” to the contradiction itself, often seen in logic, law, or philosophy.

***

Boxer, It is this internal exclusion which leads to a dialectic which the reality and pleasure principles are doomed never to resolve, which the religious ideal offers to relegate [v],

[v] The position of the saint, and of the via negativa in religion indicates that this is not the whole truth. “A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not charité [charity]. Rather, he acts as déchet [left-over]; his business being decharité. So as to embody what the structure entails, namely allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire. In fact it is through the abjection [destitute] of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the structure….” Television p15.

See Television : 31st January 1974 : Jacques Lacan, on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19740131 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts,

P19-20, October v40, of Denis Hollier’s, Rosalind Krauss’, and Annette Michelson’s translation, A saint’s business , to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he acts as trash [déchet] ; his business being trashitas [il décharite]. So as to embody what the structure entails , namely allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious , to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire.

In fact it is through the abjection of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the structure. For the sadint, this is not amusing, but I imagine that for a few ears glued to this TV it converges with many of the oddities of the acts of saints.

That it produces an effect of jouissance -who doesn’t “get” the meaning [sens] along with the pleasure [joui]? The saint alone stays mum; fat chance of getting anything out of him. That is really the most amazing thing in the whole business. Amazing for those who approach it without illusions: the saint is the refuse of jouissance.

***

Boxer, Moral effort, fortified by a spiritual ascesis, was the keynote, while the source of grace itself was judged to lie less in inward conviction of salvation than in the sacraments, notably the eucharist and penance more frequently and consistently used, and in assiduous prayer. [viii] [viii] Lacan speaks of this ascesis in relation to psychoanalysis itself in Function and field of speech and language (Écrits p105 Alan Sheridan’s translation): “Of all the undertakings that have been proposed in this century, that of the psychoanalyst is perhaps the loftiest because the undertaking of the psychoanalyst acts in our time as a mediator between the man of care and the subject of absolute knowledge.[116] This is therefore why it requires a long subjective ascesis, and one which can never be interrupted, since the end of the training analysis itself is not separable from the engagement of the subject in its practice.”

[116] (Alan Sheridan’s footnote) 116. ‘. . . comme médiatrice entre l’homme du souci et Ie sujet du savoir absolu’. Souci is the usual French rendering of the Heideggerian Sorge, savoir of the Hegelian Wissen [Tr.]

From The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome) : 26^th September 1953 : Jacques Lacan : Also known as the Rome Report. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (September 1953)

***

Boxer, It was this direction that Newman’s Grammar of Assent sought to articulate in relation to the Anglican tradition. It argued for the particular importance of ritual in the religious process, but, in doing so, as Lacan points out, rejected assent itself from the field of structure. This parallels the Lévi-Straussian graph which extracted the subject from the structures of kinship [ix].

[ix] “In demonstrating the power of the apparatus constituted by the mytheme in analysing mythogenic transformations, which at this stage seem to become established [s’instituer] in a synchrony simplified by their reversibility, Lévi-Srauss does not presume to deliver up to us the nature of the myth-maker [le mythant]. He simply knows here that his informer, while able to write the raw and the cooked – though lacking the genius whose mark has been left there – cannot do it, however, without checking at the cloakroom, i.e. at the Museum of Man, a certain number of operative instruments, otherwise known as rituals, which consecrate his subject existence as myth making; in checking them, what in another grammar would be called his assent is rejected from the field of structure. (C.f. John Henry Newman’s Grammar of Assent (published in 1870), somewhat powerful, albeit written for execrable purposes – I will perhaps be led to mention it again).” p 10-ll Science and Truth [The Grammar of Assent by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Longmans Green & Co 1895 pp40-4l]

From p10 to 11 of Bruce Fink’s translation, Science and Truth (Opening session of Seminar XIII) : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan, on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

***

Boxer, Through a topologising of the Augustinian De Trinitate, Lacan argues that the Freudian “Wo es war, soll lch werden” takes us not to assume our own causality, but to a Spinozian self-cause which can take on the name of God, but still is “some-Thing Else” [Autre Chose] [x] .

[x] pp 21 and 13, Science and Truth.

See Science and Truth (Opening session of Seminar XIII) : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan, on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

-P13 of Bruce Fink’s translation,

The fact that these inscriptions commingle [se mélent] could have been simply accounted for by topology, there being at hand’s reach a surface in which front and back are situated so as to join up at all points.

This goes much further than an intuitive schema, for it is in so to speak wrapping around the analyst in his being that this topology can grasp him

That is why, though the analyst shifts topology to another plane. it can only be in a breaking up of a puzzle which must, in any case, be reduced to this basis.

-& p13-14 of Bruce Fink’s translation, Now this cause is what is covered by the “soll ich“, the “must I” of Freud’s expression, which, in reversing (renverser) its meaning, brings forth the paradox of an imperative that presses me to assume my own causality.

Yet I am not the cause of myself, though not for being the creature. The case is precisely the same for the Creator. 1 refer you on this point to Augustine and the prologue of his De Trinitate.

The Spinozian self-cause can take on the name of God. Still it is some-Thing Else [Autre Chose (another thing)]. But let’s leave that to the two words (“Autre” and “Chose“] I will only play on by stipulating that the Spinozian self-cause is also some-Thing other (Chose autre] than the Whole, and that this God, being other in this way. is nevertheless not the God of pantheism.

-& p21 of Bruce Fink’s translation, There is fantasy therein, it is in the most rigorous sense of the institution of a real which covers over the truth.

The fact that Christian truth had to formulate the untenable notion of a Three and One God does not strike me as inaccessible to scientific investigation. On this point, ecclesiastical power adapts remarkably well to a certain discouragement of thought.

Before accentuating the impasses of such a mystery, it is worthwhile reflecting upon the necessity of this mystery’s articulation; thought must be measured against this necessity.

The question must be broached at the level at which dogma lapses into heresy — and the question of the Filioque[43] seems to me to allow of explanation in topological terms.

Structural apprehension must be primary therein; it alone permits an accurate assessment of the function of images. De Trinitate here has all the characteristics of a theoretical work and we can take it as a model.

Were this not the case, I would advise my students to expose themselves to a sixteenth-century tapestry awaiting them in the foyer of the Mobilier National**, on display for another month or two, that forces itself upon one’s gaze.

The Three People, represented in an absolute identity of form, perfectly at ease talking amongst themselves on the fresh banks of Creation, are quite simply anxiety-provoking.

And what is hidden by such a well-made machine, when it confronts the couple, Adam and Eve, in the flower of their sin, is certainly of the sort to be proposed as a mental exercise on human relationships, ordinarily imagined to never exceed duality.

But my audience should first become versed in Augustine. . .

[43] A doctrine according to which the Holy Ghost proceeds both from the Father and from the Son (in Latin “filioque” means “and from the son”).

JE notes, the filioque clause has been controversial since its adoption in the ‘Apostles’ Creed’ in the second Ecumenical council of 381A.D. in Constantinople.

From Wikipedia, December 2025, The first ecumenical council, that of Nicaea (modern day İznik Province, Turkey), in 325, ended its Creed with the words “and [sc. I believe] in the Holy Spirit”. The second, that of Constantinople in 381 spoke of the Holy Spirit as “proceeding from the Father” (ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς ἐκπορευόμενον). This last phrase is based on John 15:26 (ὃ παρὰ τοῦ πατρὸς ἐκπορεύεται).

The third ecumenical council, held at Ephesus in 431, which quoted the creed in its 325 form, not in that of 381, decreed in its seventh canon:

“It is unlawful for any man to bring forward, or to write, or to compose a different (ἑτέραν) Faith as a rival to that established by the holy Fathers assembled with the Holy Ghost in Nicæa. But those who shall dare to compose a different faith, or to introduce or offer it to persons desiring to turn to the acknowledgment of the truth, whether from Heathenism or from Judaism, or from any heresy whatsoever, shall be deposed, if they be bishops or clergymen; bishops from the episcopate and clergymen from the clergy; and if they be laymen, they shall be anathematized”.

While the Council of Ephesus thus forbade setting up a different creed as a rival to that of the first ecumenical council, it was the creed of the second ecumenical council that was adopted liturgically in the East and later a Latin variant was adopted in the West. The form of this creed that the West adopted had two additions: “God from God” (Deum de Deo) and “and the Son” (Filioque).

** The Mobilier National, a former furniture storage unit for the monarchy created in 1663 by Louis XIV and Colbert, is in charge of the furniture of the official palaces of the Republic: Palais de l’Elsyée, ministères… The Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins, whose history dates back to the 15th century, has occupied the current site since the 17th century. Production in the workshops never stop. In 1937, the two entities, as well as the manufactures of Beauvais (tapestries) and Savonnerie (carpets), are grouped together on the historic site of the Gobelins. The collections consist of around 200,000 pieces and have exceptional value in the Galerie des Gobelins (1914) where temporary exhibitions are also held including both ancient and contemporary creations.

It has not been possible to find the exact tapestry, please contact if you have further information.

***

Boxer, For Spinoza, Erasmus’s solution led to a cop-out which encouraged ignoramuses. [xi] [xi] Ecumenicalism appears as an organising principle for this position, in which everyone is left to find their own resolution to their own private doubts. For Lacan, the implications of this are clear: “Ecumenicalism only seems to have a chance if it is grounded in an appeal to the feeble-minded” p22 Science and Truth

See Science and Truth (Opening session of Seminar XIII) : 1^st December 1965 : Jacques Lacan, on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19651201 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

P22 of Bruce Fink’s translation, I seem to have thus only defined characteristics of religions from the Jewish tradition. They are no doubt helpful in showing us the interest thereof – and I am inconsolable at having had to drop my project of relating the function of the Name-of-the-Father to the study of the Bible. [44]

The fact remains that the key lies in a definition of the relation of the subject to truth.

I believe I can say that insofar as Claude Lévi-Strauss conceives of Buddhism as a religion of the generalized subject, i.e. involving an indefinitely variable stopping down[45] of the truth · as cause, he flatters this utopia in believing that it concords with the universal reign of Marxism in society.

Which is perhaps to make too little of the exigencies of the subject of science, and to lend too much credence to the emergence in theory of a doctrine of the transcendence of matter.

Oecumenicalism only seems to have a chance if it is grounded in an appeal to the feeble-minded.

As concerns science, I cannot today say what seems to me to be the structure of its relations to the truth as cause, for our progress this year shall contribute to an understanding of this point.

[Lacan’s note:] I put on hold the Seminar which I had announced for 1963-64 on the Name-of-the-Father, after having closed the opening lesson (in November of 1963) with my resignation from the public forum [place] of Sainte-Anne at which my seminars were held for ten years. [See Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Seminar : 20^th November 1963 : Jacques Lacan on this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19631120 or Index to Jacques Lacan’s texts)]
Lacan’s term here is “diaphragmatisation” which indicates the closing of an aperture, like that of a camera.

***

Boxer, Hence arose heresy, which was individualism in religion. Hence also economic individualism, the disruption of society and its traditional communities by private greed. Laud, with the support of the King, would return patrimony to the Church, recovering alienated patronage and the tithes that went with it, thus enabling these problems to be overcome by re-establishing a proper relation to the religious.

It was this direction that Newman stood for, although he saw the failure of the Oxford Movement in its pact with the State. [xiii]

[xiii] In this critique of the social form of the Church, Lacan follows Newman, although it leads Lacan to very different conclusions: “As for religion, it should rather serve us as a model not to be followed, instituting as it does a social hierarchy wherein the tradition of a certain relation to truth as cause is preserved. Simulation of the Catholic Church, reproduced whenever its relation to truth as cause spills over into the social realm, is particularly grotesque in a certain International Psycho-analytical, owing to the condition it imposes upon communication”. p24 Science and Truth.

In Television, Lacan seems to refer to this tendency as PIPAAD – a professional insurance plan against analytic discourse (p15) which could perhaps be called the discourse of the movement, or of the Establishment as Bion referred to it in writing about the disruptive effects of the mystic in Attention and Interpretation.

P24 of Bruce Fink’s translation of ‘Science and Truth’,

To be more explicit, recourse to magical thought explains nothing. What must be explained is its efficiency.

As for religion, it should rather serve us as a model not to be followed, instituting, as it does a social hierarchy wherein the tradition of a certain relation to truth as cause is preserved.

Simulation of the Catholic Church, reproduced whenever its relation to truth as cause spills over into the social realm, is particularly grotesque in a certain International Psycho-analytical, owing to the condition it imposes upon communication.

Need it be said that in science, as opposed to magic and religion, knowledge is communicated?

It must be stressed that this is not merely because it is usually done, but because the logical form given this knowledge includes a mode of communication which sutures the subject knowledge.

That is the main problem raised by communication in psycho-analysis. The first obstacle to its scientific value is that the relation to truth as cause, in its material guises, has remained neglected by the circle of its elaborators.

Television : Broadcast 31^st January 1974, Edited & recorded October & November 1973 : Jacques Lacan interviewed by Jacques-Alain Miller.

See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19740131 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts) .

P14-15 of Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelsons’ translation,

–But you yourself are excluded from that which makes for social bonds between analysts, aren’t you . . .

– The Association – so-called International, although that is a bit of a fiction, having been for so long now limited to a family business- I still knew it in the hands of Freud’s direct and adopted descendants; if I dared- but I warn you that here I am both judge and plaintiff, hence partisan- I would say that at present it is a professional insurance plan against analytic discourse. The PIPAAD.

Damned PIPAAD!

They want to know nothing of the discourse that determines them. But they are not thereby excluded from it; far from it, since they function as analysts, which means that there are people who analyse themselves by means of them.

So they satisfy this discourse, even if some of its effects go unrecognized by them. On the whole, they don’t lack prudence; and even if it isn’t the true kind, it might be the do-good kind.

Besides, they are the ones at risk.

So let’s turn to the psychoanalyst and not beat about the bush. Though what I am going to say is to be found under that bush just as well.

Because there is no better way of placing him objectively than in relation to what was in the past called: being a saint.

During his life a saint doesn’t command the respect that a halo sometimes gets for him.

No one notices him as he follows Balthasar Gracian’s Way of Life- that of renouncing personal brilliance- something that explains why Amelot de la Houssaye thought he was writing about the courtier.

A saint’s business, to put it clearly, is not caritas. Rather, he acts as trash [ déchet] ; his business being trashitas [ il décharite].

So as to embody what the structure entails, namely allowing the subject, the subject of the unconscious, to take him as the cause of the subject’s own desire.

In fact it is through the abjection of this cause that the subject in question has a chance to be aware of his position, at least within the structure.

***

Boxer, Sacramental practice

Natural religion depended on real assent, while revealed religion rested on notional assent. “Natural religion is based upon the sense of sin; it recognises the disease, but it cannot find, it does not look out for the remedy. That remedy, both for guilt and for moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ.” [xxi] This mediation, through the sacramental practice which was the Church, was the way to notional assent to the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. In these terms, the way to the perfection of the Illative Sense was therefore through the sacramental practices of the Church. [xxii]

At the heart of Newman’s Grammar, therefore, lay a strategy for dealing with an impossibility – the impossibility of a real assent to the doctrine of the Trinity. This strategy was a form of sacramental practice built around an Object of faith.

[xxi] p487 The Grammar of Assent by John Henry Cardinal Newman. Longmans Green & Co 1895.

[xxii] J. L.Newman Austin was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and it is tempting to speculate that his notion of “illocutionary force” was an objectification of Newman’s Illative Sense. In How to do things with words (OUP 1962), Austin distinguishes between “a locutionary act, which is roughly equivalent to uttering a certain sentence with a certain sense and reference, which again is roughly equivalent to ‘meaning’ in the traditional sense; and illocutionary acts such as informing, ordering, warning, undertaking etc, i.e. utterances which have a certain (conventional) force.” Perhaps in order to include the effects of the Other as other than an Illative Sense characteristic of the nature of human being, Austin included a third “perlocutionary act what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing, persuading, deterring, and even, say, surprising or misleading.”

***

Boxer, At the heart of Newman’s Grammar, therefore, lay a strategy for dealing with an impossibility – the impossibility of a real assent to the doctrine of the Trinity. This strategy was a form of sacramental practice built around an Object of faith.

Moment of truth

Contrast Newman’s impossibility with Luther’s legacy, in which “what lies at the heart of man’s destiny is the Ding, the causa. For Luther, God’s eternal hatred of men is correlative of the relationship that exists between a certain influence of the law as such and a certain conception of das Ding as the fundamental problem and, in a word, as the problem of evil.” [xxiii]

Luther gave us the beyond of undecideability, that in which truth is grounded through speech; and Newman gave us the structure of the subject’s relationship to truth as cause, if we are to extract something of it through a topologising of the Augustinian De Trinitate.

[xxiii] p97 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar VII of Jacques Lacan 1959-1960. Tavistock 1992.

Seminar VII The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-1960) : from 18th November 1959 : Jacques Lacan

13^th January 1960, p97 of Dennis Porter’s translation, To understand Freud’s position relative to the Father, you have to go and look up the form it is given in Luther’s thought, when he had his nostrils tickled by Erasmus. …

… Luther writes of the following – God’s eternal hatred of men, not simply of their failures and the works of their free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world was created. You see that there are reasons why I advise you to read religious authors from time to time; I mean good ones, of course, not those who are all sweetness and light, although even they are sometimes rewarding. Saint François de Sales on marriage is, I assure you, better than Van de Velde on ideal marriage. But in my opinion Luther is much more interesting. That hatred which existed even before the world was created is the correlative of the relationship that exists between a certain influence of the law as such and a certain conception of das Ding as the fundamental problem and, in a word, as the problem of evil. I assume that it hasn’t escaped your attention that it is exactly what Freud deals with when the question he asks concerning the Father leads him to point out that the latter is the tyrant of the primitive horde, the one against whom the original crime was committed, and who for that very reason introduced the order, essence, and foundation of the domain of law.

***

Boxer, For Lacan, the undecide-ability rests on a division of the subject which is the subject of science. This subject is a knot which he formulates as Borromean.

Science offers us a suturing of this subject, while religion offers us its relegation.

Lacan offers us another way: the phallus, as nothing but the site of the lack [point de manqué] it indicates in the subject. [xxiv]

[xxiv] Lacan considers four modes of “the cause’s refraction” which can be related to Aristotle’s four causes and which lay the foundations for the four discourses: magic, religion, science and psychoanalysis. Each of these forms of discourse is constituted by its own relations to truth as cause. pp23-27 Science and Truth.

P23-25 of Bruce Fink’s translation of ‘Science and Truth’,

NOTE, Some translations have been altered & these lines are given twice. The reader is advised to consult the dual language publication at www.Freud2Lacan.com /Lacan

As we shall see, this theory is necessary to a correct integration of the function – from the standpoint of knowledge and the subject – of truth as cause.

You might have glimpsed in passing in the four modes of the cause’s refraction just surveyed here, an analogous nominal schema and the same number of modes as in Aristotle’s physics.

It’s no accident, as his physics bears marks of a logicism that still retains the savour and sapience of an original grammaticism:

Тосайта тіг ариФров та бій т ь ткриskтреr.[46]

Fink, Will it seem valid to us that the cause may remain exactly as many-sided in polymerizing.[47]

New translation, Will it remain valuable that for us the cause be exactly equal to polymerise itself [se polymériser]?

It is not the sole goal of this exploration to afford you an elegant hold on frameworks which in and of themselves escape our jurisdiction: magic, religion, and even science itself.

My concern is also to remind you that as subjects of psychoanalytic science, you must resist the temptation of each of these relations to truth as cause.

But not in the way in which you are at first likely to understand this.

Magic tempts you only insofar as you project its characteristics onto the subject with which you are dealing – in order to psychologize, i.e. misrecognize, it.

So-called magical thought – always attributed to someone else – is not a stigma with which you can label the other. It is just as valid for your fellow man as for yourself within the most common limits, being at the root of even the slightest of commandment’s effects.

To be more explicit, recourse to magical thought explains nothing. What must be explained is its efficiency.

As for religion, it should rather serve us as a model not to be followed, instituting as it does a social hierarchy wherein the tradition of a certain relation to truth as cause is preserved. .

Need I say that in science, as opposed to magic and religion, knowledge communicates itself? [Translation altered JE]?

Fink It must be stressed that this is not merely because it is usually done, but because the logical form given this knowledge includes a mode of communication which sutures the subject knowledge implies.

New Translation, But it must be emphasised that this is not only because it is the custom, but that the logical form given to this knowledge includes the mode of communication as suturing the subject that it (the mode?) implies.

Shall I conclude in returning to the point with which I began today: the division of the subject? This point constitutes a knot.

Let us recall that Freud unties the knot in his discussion of the lack of the mother’s penis, where the nature of the phallus is revealed. He tells us that the subject divides here regarding reality, seeing an abyss opening up therein against which he protects himself with a phobia, and which he at the same time covers over with a surface upon which he erects a fetish, i.e. the existence of the penis maintained albeit displaced**.

Fink, Let us, on the one hand, extract the (no) [pas-de] from the (no-penis) [pas-de-penis], to be bracketed out [a mettre entre parentheses],and transfer it to the no-knowledge [pas-de-savoir] that is the hesitation step [pas-hesitation] of neurosis.48

New Translation, On the one hand, let us extract the (no-from) [pas-de] from the (no-from-penis) [pas-de-penis], putting it in parentheses, in order to transfer it to the no-from-knowledge [pas-de-savoir], which is the no-hesitation [pas-hesitation] of the neurosis.

Fink, Let us, on the other hand, recognize the subject’s efficacity in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates truth’s site49 to him.

New translation, On the other, let us recognise the subject’s efficacity in this gnomon that he erects in himself to designate at any time the point of truth.

Fink Revealing that the phallus itself is nothing but the site of lack it indicates in the subject.

New Translation, Revealing the phallus itself that is nothing of other than this point of lack which it indicates within the subject.

Fink, This is the same index that directs me to the path along which I want to proceed this year, i.e. the path away from which you yourselves shy, as you are called forth as analysts in that lack.

New Translation, This index is also the one that shows us the way where we want to go this year, that is there, where you yourselves recoil from being in this lack, as psychoanalysts arouse.

The reference here is to 198a, lines 15-16 of Aristotle’s Physics, translated in rather different ways by the various French and English translators, many of whom combine it with the sentence that immediately precedes it in the original; Wicksteed and Cornford, for example, give: “It is clear, then, that there are such things as causes, and that they can be classified under the four heads that have been enumerated” (the part in italics corresponding roughly to the Greek text cited). Cf. Aristotle, The Physics, translated by P.H. Wicksteed and RM. Cornford, Harvard University Press, London, 1929. A word seems to be missing from Lacan’s quote, as in all of the versions of the Greek I consulted, the first word Тосайта: is followed by jar
“se polymeriser”. A polymer is a large aggregate molecule, i.e. it is made up of several smaller molecules; “polymerizing” can thus be understood here in the sense of aggregating, or becoming an aggregate: the cause becomes a composite.

**Seminar IV – Little Hans probably 27^th March 1957. Jacques Lacan examined this case study from December 1956 to April 1957. These sessions are translated by EC Seminar IV Group, and available at this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19570327 or 19561118) or www.LacanianWorksExchange.net

“pas” in French can mean both “no” (or “not”) and “step”.
“le point de vérité:” the point, place or position of truth; “site of lack” in the next sentence corresponds to “ce point de manque”, I have translated “a toute heure” by “constantly”, but the combination in French of something being erected that at every moment or hour designates the place of something else could be taken to have sundial overtones. Lacan is here playing off the expression l’heure de vérité the moment of truth, in writing à toute heure le point de vérité.

***

Boxer, He gives it to us in a dual formulation which reflects the dual impossibilities to which the Protestant and Catholic traditions are a response: “Let us, on the one hand, extract the (no) [pas-de] from the (no-penis) [pas-de-pénis] , to be bracketed out; and transfer it to the no-knowledge [pas-de-savoir] that is the hesitation step/no-hesitation [pas – hésitation] of neurosis. Let us, on the other hand, recognise the subject’s efficacy in the gnomon he erects, a gnomon that constantly indicates the site of truth [point de vérité] to him.” [xxv]

P24 of Bruce Fink’s translation of ‘Science and Truth’, See previous text for full quotation,

New Translation, JE January 2026, On the one hand, let us extract the (no-from) [pas-de] from the (no-from-penis) [pas-de-penis], putting it in parentheses, in order to transfer it to the no-from-knowledge [pas-de-savoir], which is the no-hesitation [pas-hesitation] of the neurosis.

On the other, let us recognise the subject’s efficacity in this gnomon that he erects in himself to designate at any time the point of truth [point de vérité].

Revealing the phallus itself that is nothing of other than this point of lack which it indicates within the subject.

***