Incorporeal: Lacan’s logical solution to Freudian aporias related to space

Incorporal: solução lógica de Lacan às aporias freudianas relativas ao espaço

ABSTRACT:

This article presents some findings derived from the doctoral thesis entitled Subject Topos. The problem of space in psychoanalysis. The aim is to show how Lacan used the logic of ancient stoicism to solve the Freudian problems related to space, which posed difficulties both in locating the unconscious spatially, and in clearly establishing a conception of the body, thus solving the advantages derived from the limits imposed by Aristotelian logic and Newtonian mechanics.

Keywords:
Stoicism; space; aporia; Freud; Lacan

Resumo:

Este artigo apresenta alguns achados derivados da tese doutoral intitulada Topos do Sujeito. O problema do espaço em psicanálise. O propósito é mostrar como Lacan se serviu da lógica do estoicismo antigo para solucionar os problemas freudianos relativos ao espaço, os quais colocavam dificuldades tanto para localizar espacialmente o inconsciente, como para estabelecer claramente uma concepção de corpo, resolvendo assim as aporias derivadas dos limites impostos pela lógica aristotélica e a mecânica newtoniana.

Palavras-chave:
Estoicismo; espaço; aporia; Freud; Lacan

INTRODUCTION

There are few mentions of Lacan in the term “incorporeal”. This does not detract from its importance; relevance is not based on frequency. Let us look at these mentions and the chronological order in which they appear in his elaborations.

One is in his seminar on desire:

I seem to be unaware of the existence of the body. I have an incorporeal theory of analysis. That’s at least what you discover when you listen from a distance to what I’m articulating here - as it radiates. (LACAN, 1958/2014, p. 307).

This is a clarification to the critics about the way he understood the body. Apparently, it was strange for the common psychoanalyst in the light of traditional logic, since it did not coincide with the Aristotelian-Cartesian heritage.

Another mention is in Preface to a thesis (1970/2012a). It originally appeared as a Preface to Anika Rifflet-Lemaire’s Jacques Lacan. There he says: “Where to place this object a, the main incorporeal of the Stoics?” (LACAN, 1970/2012a, p. 422). Three questions should be highlighted: a) he refers directly to the ancient school from which he has taken the term, ancient Stoicism; b) he names what he believes to be the main incorporeal, object a; and c) it is at least striking that he attributes to the Stoics the invention of object a, as incorporeal, which contrasts with the common saying among some psychoanalysts who claim that object a was Lacan’s only invention. At least in this quote, Lacan seems to contradict them.

Finally, there are a couple of mentions in Radiophonie:

The first body makes the second, when it is incorporated into it.

From where the incorporeal that continues marking the first, from the time after its incorporation. Let us do justice to the Stoics for having known this term, the incorporeal, to sign in what the symbolic subjects the body.

Incorporeal is the function, which makes mathematics a reality, the application of equal effect for topology, or analysis in a broad sense for logic. (LACAN, 1970/2012b, p. 431).

It is an extensive reference and the most used among the texts that can be read about Lacan’s use of the term. In this case, he situates the relationship between the incorporeal and the body as different. Moreover, it indicates that the incorporeal is a mark of the first body that participates in the incorporation, namely, the language. Let us remember that Lacan holds that a second body, the organism, is incorporated into the language that precedes it. And he claims to do justice to the Stoics for having been the ones who, with that term, signed the function of the symbolic as subject to the body. He adds that the incorporeal is a function that makes reality, for mathematics, topology or, in a broad sense, for logic.

He later refers specifically to one of the incorporeals: “It is a question of something other than the lecton [sic], of what makes a signified legible” (LACAN, 1970/2012b, p. 438). In this case, it is worth pointing out that it is the lektón (expressible) that makes the signified legible, which means that it is not the signified itself but rather something that produces an effect in relation to it.

Having said that, let us express the purpose of this work, derived from the doctoral thesis Topos of the Subject. The Problem of Space in Psychoanalysis: to demonstrate that the incorporeal, as taken by Lacan, solves two problems that Freud tried to solve without success - without denying that his sharpness and effort took him far enough in his purpose -; the effects of the mechanistic conception and the limits that Aristotelian-Cartesian logic imposed on his conception of space. Let us add that the keys to Lacan’s use of the term incorporeal were found by him in the book The Theory of the Incorporeals in Ancient Stoicism, by Émile Bréhier (1907/2011).

1 BACKGROUND

On Lacan’s relations with Stoicism there are interesting works, although scarce. In reviewing them, it is noted that interpretations about the value and use that the term incorporeal would have in Lacan’s work differ significantly.

We found a work by Maya (2011) that takes as a starting point the quote from Radiophonie. Its purpose was to explain how it is understood, with Lacan, that the conception of body is distanced from biology, taking as a key the intertwining between organisms and language. As for the term incorporeal, it is supported by a quotation in which Deleuze takes up again the book of Bréhier, and in which he emphasizes the event value of that incorporeal. Although the author concentrates on the term event, - which is key and on which we agree -, she leaves aside the detail of the term incorporeal and its implications for the logic of the body in Lacan, which leads her, in our opinion, to a mistaken conclusion: “the body of the speaker [the analyzer] in analysis is an incorporeal” (MAYA, 2011, p. 9). Thus, he equates the body and the incorporeal, leaving aside the value of the term for ancient Stoicism and eliminating what it signifies as an effect for logic, an issue that, as we will demonstrate, is key to Lacan’s solution to the Freudian problem of space.

Another work in this regard is that of Wiener (2015). The author refers to Bréhier’s text and proposes to clear the incorporeal category in Stoicism and then address it in her reading of Lacan. She points out that the incorporeal implies a void of thought and being, in addition to mentioning the four incorporeals indicated by Brehier: lektón, space, time and void. Then she goes on to his reading of the term in Lacan, taking as a reference the same quotation from Radiophonie as Maya (2011). From there, he relates the term incorporeal with the metaphor of the “lamella”, used by Lacan, concluding that the object a is an incorporeal - without referring to the first quotation of Lacan that we brought here to accounts and in which he indicates it directly -; a conclusion that turns out to be correct, in our opinion, but without explaining how or why he arrives at it.

There is also a work by Eidelsztein, who starts from the supposed “pansomatism” to which, according to his criteria, lacanism would have arrived, making everything that exists a body and the organic body the equivalent of the real body. He directly takes up Bréhier’s text, presenting the incorporeal and making lektón equivalent to the signified, terms that, with the last quotation from Lacan that we present in the first part of this text, we had pointed out as different. He brings to mind the quotation from the seminar on desire and addresses the subject of the lamella as a two-dimensional incorporeal organ. It also introduces the reference in the Preface to a thesis about the object a as the most important incorporeal. Thus, he concludes that the lamella would be what, as an incorporeal, “makes the body sexed and mortal by the signifier” (2012, p. 6), and that the object a as “’major incorporeal,’ as Lacan designates it, is the hole that functioning as an object encloses the chain of signifier and jouissance” (2012, p. 6). We consider his conclusions valid. However, as it usually happens in most of the works reviewed, there is a rush to leave aside the theory of the incorporeals without understanding how it corresponds to and contributes to the elaborations proposed by Lacan; that is, they are used exclusively as secondary references to give historical context to Lacan’s use of the term incorporeal but there is no rigorous development on its logic or how it contributes to solve some contribution to the theory or logic that sustains psychoanalytic practice.

There is another work by Emilio Faire (2005) whose development consists of indicating the relationships between Saussure’s linguistics and the incorporeal. It presents the four incorporeals of Stoicism and a brief reference to Bréhier’s text, and then focuses on the quotation from Radiophonie. Like Eidelsztein, he equates signified g with the incorporeal, and even reverses Lacan’s statement: “from the incorporeal that continues to mark the former [referring to the symbolic body]” (1970/2012a, p. 431), according to which it is the incorporeal that acts as a mark on the symbolic; in the author’s view, thanks to the equivalence between signified and the incorporeal, the opposite would occur, in addition to equating signified with the organic body:

The first [refers to the symbolic body. Italics in the original] continues to mark the incorporeal - as language is incorporated into the organism, it marks the flesh, the organism, and thus organizes the body, constructs it. The effect of words in the form of a scalpel - both bodies, in the stoic sense- over the flesh/organism -which is another body - is a incorporeal (FAIRE, 2005, p. 3).

In the quote is expressed the inversion that we have indicated as to what Lacan said and, furthermore, the equivalence between organic and incorporeal body, a similar path to the one taken by Maya (2011). However, for her that correspondence is not with the organic body but with the body of which the analyzer speaks.

We will conclude this section by referring to a work by Olga Prósperi (n.d.), in which she follows the reading of Bréhier’s text and proposes to situate “the thread that unites in the ancient Stoics the concepts of body, incorporeal, language, logic ” [bold and italics in the original] (PRÓSPERI, n.d., p. 31). He says that the way in which the Stoics conceived the study of bodies and nature led them to the need to create this new logical category in order to respond to physical difficulties, which he describes as “a point of involution different from what has been known until now (PRÓSPERI, n.d., p. 32). He develops the theme of causes from the points of view of Aristotle and Plato, by which the Stoics would have been forced to raise the incorporeals, and then he goes on to the incorporeal logic, bringing to light a clarification taken from Bréhier’s text, key in his work as well as in ours: the incorporeals do not correspond either to words or to things. This clarification was presented by Bréhier as follows: “It is necessary that the ‘non-being’ [refers to the incorporeal] studied by logic be neither words nor things” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 45). This makes it possible to separate the incorporeal from the bodies of the sensible world, that is, from any material object in the sense of physics, and from what enters the field of language itself, be they signifiers or signifieds. This, in our opinion, is the most rigorous work found in what concerns general stoic logic and Bréhier’s text.

2 TWO FREUDIAN APORIAS

To affirm that Freud strictly adhered to the prevailing Newtonian mechanicism of his time would be as imprecise as affirming that he did not try to adapt to the limits imposed by the queen of science; the guiding ideas in his Project of Psychology (FREUD, 1895/1986) demonstrate this:

1) to conceive what differentiates the activity of rest as a Q subject to the general law of motion, and 2) to suppose as material particles the neurons. (FREUD, 1895/1986, p. 339).

The first takes up again the general law of the Newtonian movement that, inherited from Aristotelianism, assumes it as a mechanical action, so the difference between activity and rest is central. The second one emulates the atom as a minimum particle of matter. We thus confirm the seal of Newton’s mechanicism in the guiding ideas of Freud’s scientific Project. In fact, the development of the text seeks to clarify how these laws would work for the energy that passes through the neurons and thus explain the way in which the psychism operates. However, the encounter of the problems of quantities and qualities relative to memory, as well as the application of the guiding ideas to hysterical symptomatology turned his Project into a Calvary, as he made known to his friend Fliess (Letter 27):

A funny thing happened to me with my jyw. As soon as I had proclaimed my sensational novelty and requested your congratulations for having climbed the first slopes, I found myself facing new difficulties. [...] Psychology is really an ordeal for me. (FREUD, 1895/1986, p. 326-327).

His anguish went from an ordeal to a desire that led him to found a new discipline. And it was not because the problems posed by the Project remained unpublished until 1950 that they were excluded from its future development. Every time he faced the question of spatiality, the body and causality, he was forced to transgress his guiding ideas, but he refused to abandon the Aristotelian-Newtonian conception completely. This can be seen throughout his work. The interpretation of dreams (FREUD, 1900/1986) was the first place where this transgression became evident. His model of the psychic apparatus presents two movements: one progredient, respectful of the general law of movement as a mechanical action; the other, regredient, which contradicted Newtonian mechanicism and implied a change from the perspective of kinetic energy in a non-conservative system to potential energy in a conservative system, a necessary antecedent to conceive the circuit of drive, as pointed out by Lacan in his Seminar on the Fundamental Concepts, in the class of May 6 (LACAN, 1964/1987).

The regredient movement gave way properly to the unconscious. It is the return to some traces of satisfaction that are there as marks of absence, and that would explain sleep - and also the other formations of the unconscious - as “a psychic act in its own right” (FREUD, 1900/1986, p. 527). But what status does Freud give to this scheme? That of a metaphor. Not being able to situate a materiality different from the particles in the physical-anatomical sense, and a spatiality that was not the intuitive, three-dimensional one, Freud places this optical model as a metaphor. This model of the dream as a circuit - different to the neurological model, motivated by a return that goes against the movement of energy as a mechanical action in the reflex arc - implies a significant epistemological break with the two guiding ideas of his Project.

There are other transgressions of the Aristotelian-Newtonian principles. One of the most outstanding ones is related to the concepts that represent bodies of undetermined materiality and that are, at the same time, one and two: the psychic and the trauma -previous to The Interpretation of Dreams, founding the paradox that is expressed in the others - the drive, the libido, the repression, the masochism, among others. In each of them is present the question of whether they are one or two. Freud affirmed that although they show two forms - egoic and object libido, primary and proper repression, two times of trauma, etc. - they were only one. In relation to Freud’s transgressive conception of bodies, the drive is perhaps one of the most important because it introduces a continuity between two entities (psychic and somatic):

a borderline concept between the psychic and the somatic, as a psychic representative {Repräsentant} of the stimuli that come from inside the body and reach the soul, as a measure of the demand for work that is imposed on the psychic as a result of its connection with the body. (FREUD, 1915/1986, p. 117).

In the quote it is stated that psyche and soma are bodies provided with some kind of materiality that are in a “lock”, a relationship of continuity that is not the opposition of the Cartesian tradition and that could hardly be sustained from the Aristotelian perspective whose only possible relationship between two bodies is by continent/content, since, according to its physical principles, two bodies cannot occupy the same space and time. In this sense, the concept of drive subverts the Aristotelian conception of the body and the Newtonian mechanicism that assumes movement as a cause/effect of a force exercised by one body over another.

Thus, we see that for Freud the dualities are not contradictory but paradoxical structures. The psychic is an entity that is at the same time two, unconscious and conscious. Trauma is one, which is founded because there is a second time that retroactively inscribes it in a first time. Repression is one and at the same time two, primary and secondary. The libido is one, which is at the same time two, ego and object, etc.

Solving these aporias, which are presented as a contradiction to Newton’s conceptions of Aristotelianism and mechanicism, was one of the challenges that Freud faced, as well as his successors, and which, in our opinion, were rigorously addressed by Lacan. That solution required a return to Freud in order to articulate a logic that was already outlined as an anticipation of object a. There are at least three concepts in Freud that show it: the mnemic traces, marks without significant representation; the Thing, since “everything that is said about the Thing can be said about the object a” (SAFOUAN, 2009/2011, p. 79); the rock of castration, irreducible point as a lost cause.

3 THE INCORPOREAL: SOLUTION TO TWO FREUDIAN APORIAS

Lacan rearticulated the Freudian work at each point where rigor seemed destined to the aporia. Freud’s insistence on organicist explanations, in his eagerness to make psychoanalysis a natural science, required a re-turn: “to say everything again about another face so that what it contains is closed, which is certainly not absolute knowledge, but that position from which knowledge can reverse effects of truth” (LACAN, 1961/2009, p. 350). The conception of an erogenous body was not coupled with attempts at biologization, nor with the Aristotelian perspective. How could we find a different type of corporeality and a logic that would rigorously sustain it? In the face of this, Lacan found that it was time to do “justice to the Stoics for having known about this term, the incorporeal, to sign in what the symbolic is subject to the body” (LACAN, 1970/2012b, p. 431).

3.1 TWO BODIES IN THE SAME SPACE?

Bréhier (1907/2011) presents the differences between ancient Stoicism and Aristotelianism. He emphasizes that the former had a great interest in truth, while in spite of the historical tradition that supposes the same for Aristotle, and from there to modern science, “it gave as an end to science not the true, but the general and the necessary” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 45). Thus, the major premises operate as necessary generalities for every logical conclusion. However, the Stoics saw a problem in this, since this position implies that the relationship between the subject and the predicate is determined by something essential. On the contrary, they proposed that it should not be said

“The tree is green”, but: “The tree greens”. What the Stoics make us see is how there was a solution to the problem of predicating. When copulation is neglected and the subject is expressed by means of a verb where the epithet attribute is not put in evidence, the attribute considered as the whole verb, appears then no longer as expressing a concept (object or class of objects), but only a fact or an event. (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 40-41).

To change the copulation for the event implies that it suppresses: 1) any essence relative to the being, 2) any assumption of totality. Thus, the relationship between subject and predicate implies, therefore, the loss of something, an impossibility of the relationship: it is what “[...] they admit as the principle (impossibility of the relationship)” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 80).

They also admitted inter-penetration between bodies, while Aristotle only admitted the relationship continent/content: current model of neurosciences: a nervous system containing neurons and groups of neurons that execute functions; similar to Freud’s Project model. For Stoicism, on the other hand, there is no contradiction in two bodies occupying the same space: “In the thesis of the inter-penetrability of the body, one can speak neither of continent nor of content; they are confused with each other in all their parts and the place of one is the place of the other”. (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 68). Thus, in those cases, the relationship between continent and content is excluded, since there is an “[...] intimate fusion in all points of both bodies” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 68). The result of that fusion will be an incorporeal; an irretrievable loss that is neither word nor thing. Then, the action of one body on another will not be mechanical - a fundamental characteristic from Newton’s viewpoint - but the movement will be understood by them as: “an act that is always repeated again” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 73). To admit the fusion between bodies implies a constitutive loss and an act that repeats itself.

We find a first key element, since the Freudian conception of the pulsional body implies those same two conditions. Thus, substituting the Aristotelian logic of the relationship between subject and predicate and his conception of the relationship between bodies is, in our opinion, the inaugural step taken by Lacan to solve the apparent Freudian aporia. This is what he expresses in the quotation taken from Radiophonie; with it he articulates both the fusion of a body with another, a mixture in all its parts, and the resulting loss that makes no other being but the being of fact, that is, of event. There was, then, in Stoicism, both a primitive linguistics and a primitive topology, since in its doctrine “there is not in the contact of two bodies a precise point where one body ceases and another begins” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 66), so that the inner/outer continuity becomes effective, noting that it is possible to admit that those inter-penetrated bodies are at the same time one and two and are marked by a constituent loss: incorporeal.

3.2 THE REAL: LACANIAN INCORPOREALS

Lacan conceived the relationship between bodies based on a mixture. Therefore, we have the right to question whether his conception of it is, as it was for Aristotle, even for Freud, that of an apparatus, or whether it refers to movement and its effects linked to mechanical actions. But what justifies our hypothesis that it is in Stoic thought, more precisely in Bréhier’s text, that Lacan found the inputs for his amendment of the Freudian aporias?

Place

For the Stoics, the double place and emptiness was also necessary, but their way of conceiving it was different from the Aristotelian way. Instead of assuming the hypothesis that the place is what corresponds to the extremities themselves, they defined it as the interval between the extremities. Starting from there, they affirmed that the place of a body has no meaning except “as the always full interval, which can be constituted as much by a body as by another. This is what the Stoics mean by saying that the place is conceived, as well as the expressible ones, by the transition” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 65). Let us note that the word used in the quotation to indicate the passage from one body to another in relation to place is not the substitution of one body for another, but rather its transition, in addition, of course, to the fact that place is conceived in the same status as the expressible. The subtle but defining question that they tried to indicate was that they did not accept “that the bodies touch each other at their ends, either entirely or in parts” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 66). What results from this position is that:

If there is not in the contact of two bodies a precise point where one body ceases and another begins, it follows that they must, nevertheless, inter-penetrate each other unless they are separated by a vacuum. Now, this last alternative, for reasons that we will see later, is not admitted by the Stoics. (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 66-67).

Then, they admitted the inter-penetrability: “If in fact two bodies can be in the same place, all Aristotle’s aporias about the place-interval theory disappear” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 67). For Aristotle, the major aporia consisted in the fact that one could ask again and again “what is the place of this interval and thus to infinity” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 67). This aporia is only valid if it is assumed that the bodies are impenetrable, but when they are inter-penetrable, the relationship continent/content, and with it the aporia, are excluded.

We can thus recognize the coincidence between the stoic perspective and Lacan’s. This is confirmed by the quote from Radiophonie: “The first body makes the second, as it is incorporated into it. Hence the incorporeal that continues to mark the first, from the time after its incorporation” (LACAN, 1970/2012b, p. 431). Incorporation implies the inter-penetrability of bodies; body of language and body in the naive sense make an intimate fusion. This is incompatible with any neuroscientific theory produced to date, even with the perspective of Freud’s Project; the continent/content relationship was excluded for Lacan as it was for the Stoics. He recognized the line inaugurated by Freud in spite of its difficulties, without which the implementation of a writing of spatiality capable of providing the questions to interrogate the surface of the crust would be unthinkable:

But this topology, which is in the line inaugurated by Freud, when he undertook, after having opened with the dreams the field of the unconscious, the description of its dynamics, without feeling linked to any concern of cortical location, is precisely what can best prepare the questions with which the surface of the crust will be interrogated. (LACAN, 1958/2009, p. 518).

What other implications arise from this? First, that mechanical action by contact is excluded. Second, that “extension is considered to be the result of the very quality that constitutes a bodily individual. All action is conceived as a movement of tension” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 68). Thus, there would be no possible classifications such as those of genera that contain species and that can be clearly delimited by continent/content relations, between what is inside and what is outside, the inside and the outside. There is, instead, in Stoicism, a movement of constant tension from the center to some determined limit in space, and that body will be able to move, to make transitions, to change its form, because “the body carries in some way its place with it and consequently the place changes” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 69). Such a conception requires not only the use of topology as a way of writing a space that is not that of place in the Aristotelian sense, but also the renunciation of psychiatric and Freudian nosographies.

Then, Lacan founded a new conception of body, field and clinic for psychoanalysis. Correcting Freudian narcissism with the mirror stage allowed us to situate the difference between the illusion by the imaginary capture of the sensitive world and its articulation by language, and the need to introduce a subject that does not demand that ego unit, but is characterized by the mark of a division, expressible (lekton), from what a signifier represents in its relationship with another signifier:

[...] the signifier (this is where I distinguish it from the sign) is what represents a subject to another signifier.

I say this to anyone who wants to hear it, because such an articulation presupposes a discourse that has already had effects, effects of lekton, precisely. (LACAN, 1969/2012, p. 411).

If he set out to reach a knotting clinic it was, most likely, because the Stoic conception involves understanding movements in tension, transitions in body position that he brings with him to the site. Lacan’s perspective substitutes the categories for the modes and the modes relative to the movement in tension, which are incorporeal for Stoicism. In this way, what is important is not to group elements according to categories, but to “distinguish what acts and what suffers, on the one hand, and on the other, what neither acts nor suffers” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 71). To situate that which suffers and that which acts in that suffering, is therefore the center of the clinic in psychoanalysis. To classify is not to distinguish what acts and what suffers. The analysis, on the other hand, implies situating those subtleties that require a reading of movements always in tension between the materiality of the signifier, the egoic mirages and the symptoms of a body that is affected in relation to an incorporeal subject (lekton).

Now, it is important to reiterate that even though the movement of the body implies the movement of the place, place and body respond to different natures. The body is, forgiving the repetitiveness, corporal. Place, on the other hand, is incorporeal. And insofar as “place is not a sensible representation” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 71), there is no reason to look for the unconscious, nor the place of the subject, in the anatomy. If one wants to find something of it, it is necessary to assume that the “subject is cleft; Freud said it again and again in many ways, after having discovered that the unconscious only translates into knots of language” (LACAN, 1966/2012, p. 480).

Void

The void is not a minor issue in comparison to the place. It is another problem for which Stoicism found an original solution before the Aristotelian aporias. It is possible to situate in it certain sketches with which Lacan managed to articulate a starting point for another of the Freudian problems. We affirm, then, that the incorporeal theory of the void, proposed by the Stoics, was most probably the germ from which it became possible to articulate another of the most remarkable difficulties Freud had to face, namely, that of the object.

As Bréhier points out, “The question of void was resolved in an equally original and new way” (1907/2011, p. 72). They assumed that there is nothing empty in the world. However, we must avoid rushing to avoid the assumption that if there is nothing empty in the world, then the void does not exist. That would certainly be a mistake in the style of the Aristotelian syllogisms. To understand its logic, it is necessary to note that in Stoicism the infinite and the indeterminate, which were essential elements for Aristotle and Plato, are left aside. Thus, everything in the world would be determined, marked by finiteness, but its limits in space are due to the extension of its internal power, not to its finding a brake in some external force [...] This limit is undoubtedly a rational notion, but nevertheless if it is not a property, at least it is an attribute of the world” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 74).

This supports the affirmation that there is nothing void in the world, since for them “void is without limit” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 75). And since the world is body and as such limited, only the incorporeal can be unlimited. The void as incorporeal, unlimited, has a different nature than that of the body. Let us remember that the place is also an incorporeal that has the particularity of being carried by a body. On the other hand, the void for the Stoics implies the removal of all the determinations of the body, “it has no form and cannot be informed, it cannot be touched” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 75). He adds - and this is the point of our greatest interest - that the void is “considered as a kind of body attenuated until it loses all its properties, but nevertheless it exists, since it is separated from the bodies” (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 78). Thus, the void is separated from the body but at the same time it is an attenuated body, which gives it a paradoxical condition in comparison with the other incorporeal bodies. On the other hand, as it lacks any property it is unrepresentable in the sensible world. To try to articulate this peculiar existence of the void, let us add one more quotation from Bréhier’s text that we consider valuable:

[...] the Stoics who admit the principle (the impossibility of the relationship) in order to respond to the objection of the relativity of the world [...] are thus forced to represent, by good or by bad, the existing world in the midst of the existing void [...] Such is the essence of the contradiction that in middle Stoicism will imply the abandonment (with Panecio) or at least the restriction (with Posidonium) of the theories of the void [...]. (BRÉHIER, 1907/2011, p. 80-81).

If we follow carefully the logic expressed by the Stoics about the void, we find notorious similarities with what Lacan called object a. Let us remember that Lacan asked himself, “Where to place this object a, the main incorporeal of the Stoics?” (1970/2012a, p. 422). In order to situate it, it must be said that this object ex-sists. So its existence is not that of an object in the positive sense. It cannot be represented in the sensible world. It is an object that is there as a lack, that is, an object as an attenuated body that has lost all its properties. It is not a metaphorical object, but a logical object that marks a void, ex-sisting only beyond all representation and the principle of pleasure that governs bodies in the naive sense. Hence, neither the phallus, nor the gaze, nor the voice, nor the nipple, should be confused with this object. They are only a partial representation of that object, emptied of properties, incorporeal that as such makes function of reality. Therefore, they are not to be conceived as parts of a total object that would be the body:

Let us observe that this feature of the cut prevails with no less clarity in the object that analytical theory describes: nipple, scybala, phallus (as an imaginary object), urinary flow (An unthinkable list if we do not add with us the phoneme, the gaze, the voice - the nothing). Well, doesn’t it seem that the feature: partial, rightly underlined in the objects, does not apply to the fact that they are part of a total object that would be the body, but to the fact that they only partially represent the function that produces them? (LACAN, 1960/2009, p. 778).

It is articulated by that way that there is no being of the whole, total object, but that the whole is a non-being, a non-all, an incompleteness whose trace, as a lost cause, cause of the unconscious, is put into play by that emptiness that is nothing as a body and, at the same time, is something as a mark of a diminished, unrepresentable body, lacking any sensible property:

This indicates that the cause of the unconscious - and note that in this case the word cause must be understood in its ambiguity, a cause to be defended, but also a function of the cause at the level of the unconscious -, this cause must be conceived intrinsically as a lost cause. (LACAN, 1964/1987, p. 134).

Now, where Bréhier says that some Stoics abandoned the theory of the void and others restricted it, Lacan took a step towards the impossible by assuming the paradox as a structure. This is of great value for the Freudian theories and clinic, but also for the logic in Stoicism, since we see that Lacan continued to walk the path opened by the ancients without yielding in his desire, which did not happen with them, who, upon retreating, surrendered to morality and religiosity, which could be seen as a way of expressing Lacan’s thesis about guilt as a consequence of having yielded in desire.

4 CONCLUSION

The Lacanian re-articulation of Stoic thought facilitated the step towards the solution of Freudian problems related to space. It was his reading of Émile Bréhier’s text that left the mark that we find deployed in a good part of his elaborations.

According to Bréhier, the incorporeals for the Stoics solve differently from the other classical schools what refers to the relationship between subject and predicate, particularly the problem of the properties and attributions involved in copulation. From there, they proposed original solutions.

By virtue of this, we affirm that Freud’s Project received a subtle amendment from Lacan who, conserving the deepest part of his logic, rearticulated his two guiding ideas, substituting them in the light of Stoicism. The Aristotelian-Newtonian mechanical movement, as the first guiding idea, was substituted by movement in a Stoic sense, always in tension and as an act that is repeated by singular effectiveness. It constitutes a continuum with the amendment to the second guiding idea, substituting the neuron as the minimum material unit, for the letter as support of the signifier that, in turn, makes room for its incorporation in the body in a naive sense to the subject of the unconscious as incorporeal.

REFERENCES

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• Traduzido do espanhol por Juan Manuel Martínez / Translated from spanish by Juan Manuel Martínez, Docente Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  19 Apr 2021
• Date of issue
  Jan-Apr 2021

History

• Received
  06 Feb 2020
• Accepted
  24 Nov 2020