The Possible and the True Formula of Atheism

Jack W. Stone

The original document was in what is known as Hanno O' Hanno's unbrookable script, that is to say, it showed no signs of punctuation of any sort. Yet on holding the verso against a lit rush this new book of Morses responded most remarkably to the silent query of our world's oldest light and its recto let out the piquant fact that it was pierced butnot punctured (in the university sense of the term) by numerous stabs and foliated gashes made by a pronged instrument. These paper wounds, four in type, were gradually and correctly understood to mean stop, please stop, do please stop, and O do please stop respectively, . . . (Finnegans Wake, "The Letter," 123-124)

In extending this process is born the forumula, mine, that there is no universal that does not have to contain itself by an existence that denies it. So that the stereotype that all men are mortal is not stated from nowhere (nulle part). The logic that dates it is only that which feigns this nullibiquity, to make an alibi for what I have named the discourse of the master.

Now it is not from this discourse alone, but from the place others (other discourses) turn around, which I designate of the semblant, that a dire takes its sense.

This place is not for all, but it ex-sists to them, It is only from there that it is hommologized¹ that all are mortal. They all can only be so, because to death one delegates them from this place, all indeed must be, since it is there that one sees to the marvel of the good of all. And particularly when what sees to it makes a semblant of the master-signifier or knowledge. Whence the ritournelle of philosophical logic.

Thus, there is no universal that does not reduce itself to the possible. Even death, since this is the point from which only it is articulated. However universal one makes it, it remains never more than possible. That the law lightens itself by affirming itself as formulated from nowhere, which is to say, as being without reason, again confirms from where its dire departs. (Jacques Lacan, L'Etourdit; Silicet 4, p. 7)

. . . the true formula of atheism is not God is dead--even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father--the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious. (Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Sheridan 59)

Based on the above passage from L'Etourdit, it would seem that the universal reduces itself to a possibility itself reduced to death. But both Freud and Lacan recognize a "vital ambiguity" in the relationship of life to death: like love and hate, life and death are the single surface of a Moebius strip. We could say that death=castration, or that to be castrated, subject to the phallic function--inscribed in the all, or universal register of the masculine side of the sexuation table--means to be delegated to death. But while one cannot accede to life as a desiring subject except as castrated, as subjected to death as a necessary "absolute master," both death and castration are multi-faceted dynamics, "complexes" which exclude neither life nor being "not all" subject to castration--at least insofar as this necessary is experienced as a contingency,² a particularity dislodged from any supposed universality.

In his "Rome Discourse," having noted that "the first symbol where we recognize humanity in its vestiges, is the sepulchre" and that "the mediation of death is recognized in every relation where man comes to the life of his history" (Ecrits 319), Lacan adds,

The liberty of man is inscribed all in the constituting triangle of the renunciation he imposes on the desire of the other by the threat of death for the enjoyment of the fruits of his slavery--of the consented to sacrifice of his life for the reasons which give to human life its measure--and of the suicidal renunciation of the vanquished frustrating of his victory the master whom he abandons to his inhuman solitude. (Ecrits 320)

In the first of these deaths, we can see Freud's "hysterical" group identification, the enslaving renunciation by the subject of his desire in favor of the "sheep-like aggregations of the Eros of the symbol" (Ecrits 320), and his projection of a universalizing, obturating central point to the fantasy, comprised by an impossible conjoining of the objet a with the symbolic ego ideal; in the second, the subject's sacrificial alienation in the signifier, the vorstellungsreprasentenz, which, barring the eroticized object in which the subject supposes his or her being, makes the trait unaire in which the subject is situated as drive the source of the ego ideal; in the third, there is a separation of symbol from the eros of the symptom, a dropping of the object, a voiding of symptomal jouissance, and the "desperate affirmation of the life which is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct" (320).

In this third "face" (figure) of death, leading to the subject's affirmation of an Eros--no longer of the symbol but of the real--in a "malediction without words" (320) that renders the symbol an empty signification,³ we can recognize the purest form of love: the "nirgends" (nowhere) and "nihil" (nothing) approached by a demand admitting of no satisfaction in any object of need (Ecrits 691) or any fetishized object of desire. This is the flat, maledictory love obtained at the obrescene (obscene and autre scene) (Ornicar? 17, p. 12) end of an analytic deathwork that has attained to the real of the symptom, and to a nullibiquity only feigned in the discourse of the master. But however pure this love, however empty its signification, this real will continue to be put in place, localized, as a caput mortuum, an irreducible remainder, leaving resonant traces of the speaking being's exile (Encore 132) that the lover will never cease to find in his or her contingent object choices. The subject will never cease succumbing to the illusion that the sexual rapport ceases not writing itself, as he or she discovers in others' symptoms and affects (Encore 132) the unknottable knot of his or her own symptom.

In Le Sinthome (1975-76), Lacan makes the link of castration to the possible, this delegation to death, more explicit:

The creation called divine is redoubled . . . by the parlotte, the parlêtre, whereby Eve makes of the serpent what you will permit me to call the clenched-buttocks (serre-fesse), ulteriorly designated as a flaw (faille) or, better, a phallus, since there must indeed be one to make the false step, the fault (faute). This is the first fault --it is the advantage of my sinthome to begin with that: sin in English means le peché. Whence the necessity that does not cease the flaw, which always gets bigger, unless it undergoes (subir) the cease of castration as possible.

This possible, I have said elsewhere it is what ceases to write itself, but one must put in the comma, which I myself have omitted. It is what ceases,--comma--to write itself. Or rather would cease to make its way, in the case where finally would come to past (adviendrait) that discourse I have evoked, which would not be of the semblant. (Joyce avec Lacan 38-9)

Lacan makes it clear, in his seminar D'un discours qui ne serait pas du semblant and elsewhere, that there is no discourse that is not of the semblant; which perhaps explains what he means when he writes in Joyce le symptôme II that the "only definition of the possible" is that "it cannot take place" (J. avec L. 32). It cannot take place, we could say, except as a comma taken up in a dynamic identifiable with the above death-triangulation (the true formula of atheism is not God is dead, but that he is comma-tose). A comma, not a full-stop but a false-step or "fillstup," is how Joyce responds to the "O do please stop" provoked by, and inscribed in, the ever expanding non-cessation of his Sinthome, his creationist writing of the flaw. And this writing could be said to take him beyond the pleasure principle to somewhere approaching "the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct." As Lacan remarks later, "what psychoanalysis calls pleasure is to suffer, to undergo (subir) the least possible"; the possible can thus be defined as "what ceases the least to write itself. And in fact it (ça) does not cease an instant" (Ornicar? 17, p. 20)--it certainly doesn't for Joyce.

Lacan had discussed the possible at greater length in Sèminaire XXI: Les non-dupes errent, 1973-74, where he establishes his project as not being to make his analysands non-dupes, subjects without a father (Lyotard claims that philosophers, unlike psychoanalysts, have no father), but of bringing them to assume their status as subjects duped by the father as real. They must do so lest they erre, which is to say, lest they go on repeating the same stupid mistakes as if that would get them anywhere. Life is not a highway; it's a knot, or chain-knot, which we have to learn to faire avec (do with) as such. In this seminar, Lacan also considers the relation of truth to knowledge, stating "I do not discover the truth, I invent it . . . c'est ça, le savoir" (2/19/74). He adds that the "true dire is something that stumbles . . .stumbles on this: . . . in the untenable either/or which would be that all that is not man is woman and visa-versa, what decides, what clears the way, is nothing other than this dire, this dire which is engulfed in what there is of the hole by which there lacks in the real what could inscribe itself of the sexual rapport" (2/19/74).

A little earlier, Lacan tells us that,

the norm of the man . . . consists in his knowing that there is an impossible and that, as says the charming woman I have already cited: "Nothing is impossible for the man; what he cannot do, he leaves alone." This is what one calls mental health. Specifically, that of his never writing the sexual rapport, except in the lack of his desire, which is nothing but his being-gripped (son serrage) in the Borromean knot. This is why I have expressed it . . . "I ask (demande) that you refuse what I offer, because that (ça) is not it (ça)." Not it that I desire you to accept, nor to arrive at anything of the sort, for I have no business except with this knot itself. (1/15/74)

In Les non-dupes errent, Lacan discusses the relationship of the possible with the impossible in terms reminiscent of his discussions of alienation and separation in Four Fundamental Concepts: in terms of an either/or, a both/and, and a neither/nor. (In one of his NFF articles, Bruce Fink identifies the either/or with the vel of alienation, and the neither/nor with the vel of separation; the both/and seems to come somewhere in between). The "untenable either/or" is the possible, that "which cannot take place"--except as the comma of an alienation which only really functions as alienation when over-lapped by a separation that negates it, causes it to be unterdrüaut;cken (alienation without separation is psychotic foreclosure). In other words, any possible closure of the unconscious is necessarily tied, in a "temporal pulsation," to the impossible and contingent of its opening. The possible cannot take place inasmuch as we cannot arrive at the point-at-infinity, the point of an impossible universal doxa, which would close the surface of the fantasmic asphere; we can only projectively "suppose" the possibility of this point.

As Lacan explains,

Whatever truth there is can only be translated as this "does not cease to write itself." Everyone sees that between this fact, the fact that something does not cease to write itself--if you understand by this that it repeats itself, that it is always the same symptom, always falls into the same socket--you see that between the "does not cease to write itself, p" and the "does not cease to write itself, not p," we are in the gap which shows--and which shows at the same time the gap concerning the truth, and that the order of the possible is, as Aristotle indicates, connected to the necessary. What ceases to write itself is p or not p. In this sense, the possible shows the flaw in the truth, to the extent that there is nothing to get from it (en tirer). There is nothing to get from it and Aristotle himself shows it. He shows here his confusion, at ever instant, between the possible and the contingent . . . afterall, what ceases to write itself can also cease to not write itself, which is to say, it can come to light as the truth of the thing (truc) . . . It can happen that I love a woman just as you do--you can slip into these sorts of adventures--but that, however, gives me no assurance concerning the sexual identification of the person I love, any more than it does of mine. Only, there is something which, between all of these contingencies, could well show the presence of the real. And it is what only advances from the dire inasmuch as it is supported by the principle of contradiction. Which of course, naturally, is not characteristic of the routine (courant), everyday dire; not only do you in the routine everyday dire contradict yourself without cease--that is, you pay no attention to this principle of contradiction--but only logic raises it to the dignity of a principle, which permits you, not of course to insure any real, but to find yourself again in what it might be when you will have invented it.

This is what I have noted concerning the impossible, that is, what separates, but otherwise does not constitute the possible--it is not an either/or, but a both/and. In other terms, it is at the same time p and not p; it is impossible, which is exactly what you reject in the name of the principle of contradiction. This is, however, the real, since it is from there I depart: in other words, for any savoir, there must be an invention. This is what happens in any encounter, any first encounter with the sexual rapport.

The condition for it to pass to the real is logic, and this is how logic is invented, and why logic is the finest recourse of what there is of unconscious savoir, of what guides us in the black pot (pot-au-noir). What logic has succeeded in elucubrating is not to be held to this: that one must choose between p and not p, and that in proceeding in the vein of the principle of contradiction, we will find our way out as regards savoir. What is important, what constitutes the real, is that, by logic, something happens, which demonstrates not that at the same time p and not p are false, but that neither the one nor the other can be verified in any way. This is the point . . . the point of re-departure . . . : the impossible of one part and the other is the real as only logic permits us to define it if we are capable of inventing this refutation of the one and the other. (2/19/74)

I will not say much about this citation, except to note that it gives us a very representative example of the logic "carried to its final power" that Lacan calls the "science of the real" (L'Etourdit 6), a logic that no longer holds to the principle of contradiction, the sine qua non of classical, Aristotelian logic. This Lacanian logic partakes of the post-Cantorian "marvelous efflorescence which, in isolating in logic the incomplete from the inconsistent, the non-demonstrable from the refutable, indeed in adjoining the undecidable as not succeeding in excluding itself from demonstrability, puts us enough at the dead end (au pied de la mur) of the impossible so that is evinced there the 'that is not it , which is the wailing of the call to the real" (L'Etourdit 8).

I would also like to say something about the undecidable, situated, according to Jean-Paul Gilson, on the feminine side of the sexuation table (168). The undecidable seems to be equivalent to the unverifiable both/and. This both/and is a vrai not fully inscribed in masculine vérité; it is an equivocal saying-yes that is not quite an affirmation, or Freudian bejahung, but will also not allow us to accuse Lacan, as certain feminists (Irigaray and Cixous among others) have hastened to do, of reducing femininity to a pure negativity or lack. This both/and seems to be produced in the passage between alienation and separation, between the possible and the contingent, the "all say yes to castration" and the "not-all say yes." According to Pierre (not Giordano) Bruno, in Une Femme, un homme, le ravissement, poésie⁴, beyond the either/or (either I have the phallus or I am the phallus) "certified" by the murder of the father by the primal horde, and the suspension of this function of exception on the feminine side, we can discern

a more secret tie between this suspension of the exception and the fact that the sexual rapport, of which the existence remains impossible to demonstrate, is now revealed undecidable that is, impossible to refute.

Let us translate this irrefutable as: one cannot interdict love. And this is effectively what one can say to begin with of mystical experience: it cannot be without love. God, in this way of seeing things, no longer has anything to do with the intellectualized figure that the ontological argument contrives, in deducing existence from the concept. God is apprehended directly as an ex-sistence, for which love is required for the jouissance in play on the feminine side to be bearable in the absence of a function that legalizes it and permits its quantification (monnayage) in a savoir (think of the arithmetic, dear to to the 18^th century, between pleasure and pain. In the mystical experience, nothing like this is thinkable). An experience one has, without knowing anything about it except that one has it, is this not what is strictly unbearable? An unknown which moreover feeds, no doubt, the horror of knowing . . . that this unknown exists.(25)

Thus we could say that the true formula for atheism--and also for the mysticism on the side of feminine jouissance--is not that God is dead, but that he is undecidable. This undecidability returns the grip of the knot consisting of and by the invention of a "refutation" of the both/and to an irrefutable infinitude: the "script" of "Hanno O' NonHanno" is rendered "unbrookable" (in Italian, hanno o non hanno means "they have or have not"; here, Joyce makes this either/or a proper name, which, as a unary coincidence of these opposites, can be said to exemplify this undecidable both/and). The sexual rapport, the absence of which defines the real, is not nothing, it is merely impossible to verify. We cannot affirm, in any definitive manner, the possibility of the One realizing itself in the union of two speaking subjects, just as we cannot affirm that that a single Moebius strip has two surfaces: we can indicate it by poking a hole at some chosen point in its surface to its other side, but that proves nothing; we need only traverse the strip longitudinally to demonstrate that it has no other side, and that this chosen point is situated in a self-contradictory nowhereness, or nullibiquity (in other words, we can pierce the strip "butnot" puncture it). Nonetheless, this absence, or always-elsewhere-ness, cannot be taken as an interdiction of either desire or the love acceded to in the mystical experience. The extatic jouis-absence of Saint Theres de Avila, taken by Lacan as an instance of the mystical feminine jouissance, is, according to Bruno, not an alienating "union" with God as a phallic, possible being, which one must either have or not have, but a ravishment reducing God to the "empty signification" of "love alone": "the vrai of love," which leaves Theresa separated, derelicted like "`a sparrow alone on a rooftop,' " in a "nullibiquity of the soul, that narcissism no longer ballasts: neither in herself, nor God." This destitution, " `this desert and solitude' " nonetheless has more charm for her "than all the companionships in the world" (Bruno 25).

Notes

1. hommologisé, with two m's in the text: a portmanteau of "homologized" and homme.

2. Lacan, Le savoir du psychanalyst. See also Jean-Paul Gilson, La Topologie de Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytique (Montréal: Les Editions Balzac, 1994). The necessary corresponds in Lacan' s famous "sexuation formulas" to the "there exist at least one that says no to castration"; the possible to the "all say yes"; the impossible to the "there does not exist one as subject who says no"; and the contingent to the "not all say yes." Lacan derives these categories from On Interpretation, the second book of Aristotle's Organum.

3. Jacques Lacan, Vers un signifiant nouveau, Ornicar 17, p. 11.

4. Le Dire du Sexe, La Cause freudienne: Revue de psychanalyse # 31, 1995, 21-38.