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L’extermination de tout Symbolisme des Cieux: Reading the Lacanian Letter as Inhuman ‘Apparatus’ and Its Implications for Ecological Thinking

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Lacan and the Nonhuman

Part of the book series: The Palgrave Lacan Series ((PALS))

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Abstract

This chapter articulates Lacan’s importance for thinking the nonhuman precisely through his focus on the ‘letter in the Real,’ as it comes through his understanding of mathematical symbolism and formalism. It is the letter that allows one to articulate the fundamentally traumatic kernel of the ecological Real. Extending the work of Karen Barad and Mackenzie Wark on the ‘apparatus’ to include the letter itself as another inhuman apparatus that connects the human to the nonhuman Real fashions durable relationships with ecocritical and environmental philosophy. This extension of the Lacanian letter also may provide a way to soften Adrian Johnston’s assertion that Lacan always possessed ‘a virulent hostility to the life sciences’—a way that opens up further opportunities for interplay between Lacan and ecological thinking.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    ‘The Question Concerning Nature,’ in The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics, ed. Forest Clingerman, et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 224.

  2. 2.

    Ibid.

  3. 3.

    Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume 1: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013), p. 69.

  4. 4.

    Timothy Morton , The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 32.

  5. 5.

    See Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), for more on this splitting.

  6. 6.

    In Writings, ed. Andreas Ströhl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 160.

  7. 7.

    Flusser (2002, p. 161).

  8. 8.

    Ibid.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., p. 164.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., pp. 163–164.

  11. 11.

    Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium (New York: Ballantine, 1997), p. 11.

  12. 12.

    Flusser (2002), p. 161.

  13. 13.

    Jacques Lacan, ‘Science and Truth,’ in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 728.

  14. 14.

    Hannah Arendt , The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 3, 4.

  15. 15.

    ‘In ‘Memory of Ernest Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism,’ in Écrits, p. 596.

  16. 16.

    Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan—Book XX: Encore On Feminine Sexuality, 1972–1973, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 43.

  17. 17.

    Jean-Claude Milner , ‘The Doctrine of Science,’ Umbr(a): A Journal of the Unconscious, Science, and Truth 1: 33–63, 50, 2000.

  18. 18.

    Tom Eyers, in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 7(1): 155–166, 2011.

  19. 19.

    Ibid., p. 165.

  20. 20.

    Lacan, in Ecrits, trans. Bruce Funk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 413.

  21. 21.

    Eyers (2011), p. 163.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., p. 162.

  23. 23.

    Dany Nobus, ‘Illiterature,’ in Re-Inventing the Symptom: Essays on the Final Lacan (New York: Other Press, 2002), pp. 19–43.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., p. 29.

  25. 25.

    Ibid.

  26. 26.

    Lacan, Seminar XIV: The Logic of Phantasy, January 18, 1967, trans. Cormac Gallagher, from unedited and unpublished French manuscripts. See also the session of May 10, 1967: ‘There is only a single domain, it seems—and I am not sure about it—which has no relation with the sexual act in so far as it concerns the truth; it is mathematics , at its point of confluence with logic. But I believe that this is what allowed Russell to say that one never knows whether what one is putting forward is true.’

  27. 27.

    See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 132: ‘Language has been granted too much power.’

  28. 28.

    This is made most clear in Chapter 9 of Horowitz’s Divine Name Verification (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2013), ‘Philosophical Excursus: A Critique of “Object-Oriented Ontology,”’ p. 98, especially.

  29. 29.

    Noah Horowitz, Reality in the Name of God, or Divine Insistence: An Essay on Creation, Infinity, and the Ontological Implications of Kabbalah (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012).

  30. 30.

    Ibid., p. 89.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., p. 90. Weiss’s article quoted by Horowitz is ‘On the Matter of Language: The Creation of the World from Letters and Lacan’s Perception of Letters as Real,’ The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 17(1): 101–115, 2009.

  32. 32.

    Ibid.

  33. 33.

    Ibid.

  34. 34.

    Lacan (1998), p. 59. The previously cited session of Wednesday May 10, 1967 in Seminar XIV also supports this connection between mathematics, the (lack of) sexual relation, and the impossible.

  35. 35.

    Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p xxvi.

  36. 36.

    Wolfe (2010), p. 6; emphasis mine.

  37. 37.

    See Wolfe’s Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism for more on this critique.

  38. 38.

    Mackenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (New York: Verso Books, 2015), p. 208.

  39. 39.

    Wark, ‘The Capitolocene,’ Public Seminar, October 15, 2015. http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/the-capitalocene/#.WAfPjKOZPBI. Accessed 14 Jun 2016.

  40. 40.

    Slavoj Žižek , ‘Ecology Against Mother Nature. In Žižek on Molecular Red. http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2007-ecology-against-mother-nature-slavoj-zizek-on-molecular-red. Accessed 26 May 2015.

  41. 41.

    Wark (2015a), p. 164.

  42. 42.

    Pierre Kerszberg, ‘Natural Science and the Experience of Nature,’ Angelaki 10(1): 189, 2005.

  43. 43.

    Ibid.

  44. 44.

    Levi Bryant , The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2011), p. 44.

  45. 45.

    Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 133.

  46. 46.

    Ray Brassier , Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 49–50.

  47. 47.

    Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 11–12.

  48. 48.

    Bogost (2012), p. 8.

  49. 49.

    Slavoj Žižek , ‘Nature and its Discontents,’ SubStance 37(3): 56, 2008.

  50. 50.

    Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-Gray Street, The Ecopoetry Anthology (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2013), p. xxix.

  51. 51.

    Nobus (2002), p. 30.

  52. 52.

    Ray Brassier , ‘I Am a Nihilist Because I Still Believe in Truth,’ March 4, 2011. http://www.kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896. Accessed 14 Jul 2016; emphasis mine.

  53. 53.

    Ibid.

  54. 54.

    Quoted in Barad (2007), p. 132.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Francis, Joliet, IL, USA

    Kevin Andrew Spicer

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  1. Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Gautam Basu Thakur

  2. Independent Scholar, Worcester, MA, USA

    Jonathan Michael Dickstein

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Spicer, K.A. (2018). L’extermination de tout Symbolisme des Cieux: Reading the Lacanian Letter as Inhuman ‘Apparatus’ and Its Implications for Ecological Thinking. In: Basu Thakur, G., Dickstein, J. (eds) Lacan and the Nonhuman. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63817-1_5

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