The Borromean Knot

Abstract

In this chapter, Greenshields outlines how Lacan founded a novel psychoanalytic ontology upon three topological qualities (consistency, ex-sistence and the hole) that are established by the Borromean knot’s particular set of spatio-temporal relations and explains how these relations allow a psychoanalytic materialism to emerge. The more particular questions of how reference to the knot’s irresolvable structural paradoxes enabled Lacan to achieve his most successful presentation of the real and definitively distinguish his own conception of ‘writing’ from Jacques Derrida’s are also addressed. Finally, the relevance of the Borromean knot to many of the theoretical developments that particularised Lacan’s work in the 1970s—such as the sinthome, the body and the different modes of jouissance and love—is made clear.