“Reading in no way obliges us to understand.” —Jacques Lacan
Today, I will introduce one of the most critical components of Lacanian psychoanalysis on the function of discourse. I will show you how the unconscious subject takes different positions through the master, university, hysterics, and analyst discourse. While I already spoke about two of these positions from Clinical Context, Theory, and Practice, I will show you different ways of interpreting them and shed insights on social bond. You will get a glimpse of the underlying mechanics on ideas I spoke of in my other writings.
This post is over 10,000 words and it is around a 1 hour read. It requires you to have read my previous posts on psychoanalysis, particularly 1, 3, 4, and 5 which can be found below:
I started planning and writing this post 1 year ago. I just want to thank all those who inspired me. From the books I’ve read all the way to those who I know as friends, or the people I love and loved. Whether you’re still around or long gone, I appreciate you for being part of the journey.🙏
This post will officially be my last in 2026, as I will be conducting new research for the remainder of the year, as much as my work schedule allows. I will no longer be doing much weekly updates until next year. I will however, continue to edit this post with update notes over the next month or so.
With everything going on in our world, I wish you all much love and peace. See you next year. 🙂
Drawings are courtesy of Wikipedia
$—The split subject. S1 —The master signifier that carries truth unconscious to the split subject. S2 —Established knowledge and the network of meanings and signifiers within our languages and cultures. a—The object cause of desire.
The Discourse of Psychoanalysis
“The knowledge that there is a part of the psychic functions that are out of conscious reach, we did not need to wait for Freud to know this!” —Lacan
Psychoanalysis is the discourse of the unconscious, but it does not represent every discourse that exists in the world, many which might be undiscovered or challenge the positions of psychoanalysis. The Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse represents social bonds that unconsciously takes place between subjects as they engage and interact not only with other people, but cultural and socio-economic systems under different contexts. For Lacan, the split subject always takes position within any one of these discourses which reveals how they engage with others and themselves unconsciously. Lacan developed four discourses he spoke most of: the master, university, hysteric, and the analyst discourse. Unlike other social discourses, psychoanalysis is not meant to be a discourse about power and control. It is about subversion, transference and how these discourses change which leads to productions of new truths.
As split subjects who experiences castration the moment they speak, the words that represents who they think they are, or what certain physical objects mean are filled with alternate meanings unconscious to them. This includes how they view their friends, their parents, work, or many everyday events. When analysand free associates, what gets produced out of speech are signifiers that points to other signifiers in a never ending chain through desire. Meanings from signifiers links to other meanings just like these sentences. Yet, the neurotic speaks where they do not intend to speak where they riddle themselves in their words as they produce master signifiers during analysis.
Unlike other signifiers, a master signifier is a word that holds no inherent meaning to the split subject other than itself. It is a self-referential signifier which stops speech and desire in its tracks. But it also holds significant meaning to the speaker at an unconscious level where they think nothing of. This master signifier functions like a mirror riddled with anOther meaning unconscious to them. It may slur their speech and point to nothing but itself. It even halts signification, stopping speech altogether. A slip of the tongue occurs and something gets lost in this signification that goes unaware by the speaker. The master signifier (S1) holds onto a truth to the split subject that can only be revealed as a metaphor.
If symbolic language is what the split subject must always think and speak through, then a discourse will reveal how this language and knowledge are unconsciously positioned in their mind. Discourse sets up what is seen and consciously recognized by his or her conscious thoughts, but it also sets up what prevents them from seeing other blind spots from what they articulate. Discourse influence what is produced out of their subjective position that they are unconsciously par taking. Each discourse reveals something, but it also conceals something else that the subject is unconscious of.
In Clinical Contexts, Theory, and Practice, I introduced the most common engagements between the hysteric and analyst discourse, where the goal for the analyst is to bring the hysteric into the analyst discourse and have them question these master signifiers (S1) to produce new knowledge about them. This knowledge, as I will return to later, is not just any modes of knowledge, but brings out a new truth that can only be half-said as a split subject.
While the hysteric will always remain a hysteric, she may situate herself inside the analyst discourse, the master’s discourse, or the university discourse while fully remaining a hysteric. She may very well be a hysteric while dominantly situated in the university discourse. The hysteric does not suddenly become a master the moment she situates herself in the master’s discourse. Yet, what gets produced out of her symptoms through these discourses change.
In each discourse, the split subject takes position and carries a loss of jouissance in different ways. This is represented in the bottom left corner as “truth”. Yet, this function of loss also produces a new form of truth that is revealed in the bottom right corner as “Product” which functions as surplus jouissance. While truths are produced through out each discourse, to produce a radically new truth can only take place when the subject changes discourse.
Just as people can either be left or right hand dominant, they also tend to stay within a dominant discourse while utilizing other discourses in different contexts and situations. Yet, one cannot change discourse at their whim. Discourse only change under specific circumstances. And just as a hysteric might be dominant in the hysteric discourse who is situated inside the analyst discourse, a psychoanalyst might not always be functioning in the analyst discourse. The analyst could be situated in the master or the university discourse, such as when they are giving a lecture or talking to a friend. For example, I take position in the university discourse in this piece of writing where the knowledge of psychoanalysis takes precedence over everything else—such as my own unique sets of master signifiers (S1) that I unconsciously articulate and leads me to write.
Many analysts and scholars suspects Lacan takes on the hysteric’s discourse while he gave his annual seminars by becoming the hysterical analysand who associates psychoanalytic knowledge to his students. While it might be wise to assume it positions his students to take on the analyst discourse, they also seem to appear to take position as the hysteric, who saw Lacan as their master. In some instances, Lacan became the university discourse, who functioned as the all knowing subject where the students wanted him to offer them knowledge (the hysteric and the student’s question: “What do you want?”). They resembled to the beginning stages of how a hysteric engages with the analyst, or how anyone might engage conversations with others.
This was highlighted in one Lacans’ seminars, where his students were frustrated by his lecture who was unwilling to offer any knowledge to his audience’s desires. In response, Lacan answers, “You will find a master!”, implying Lacan saw his students as hysterics who wanted to find out what the Other wants. The students needs a master and wanted to become Lacan’s desire. Lacan even went as far as drawing parallel relationships between the revolutionaries in history who sought to topple powerful authoritative governments to the hysteric who sought for a new master in society.
This metaphorical example between the hysteric and their master served as a major influence to subsequent thinkers in later Marxist circles. Lacan even gave credit to Marx for inventing the capitalist discourse—something that he never spoke much of. Some say it was because he did not know what to do with it. Others say it was an oversight on his part. I won’t be talking about the capitalist discourse today.
An important note to keep in mind is how the mathemes (S1, S2, a, $) are placed in each of these four discourses will take position as the assigned role of truth, agent, other, product—as shown in Lacan’s graphs. While each matheme represents various psychoanalytical concepts, one thing you will notice is how these discourses change meaning depending on the topics that I will talk about today. I will refer to hysterics with she/her pronouns and obsessive neurotics as he/him. While not every woman is a hysteric, and not every man is an obsessive, it makes it easier for me to navigate ideas.
The Master’s Discourse
“In this experience self-consciousness becomes aware that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness. In immediate self-consciousness the simple ego is absolute object, which, however, is for us or in itself absolute mediation, and has as its essential moment substantial and solid independence. The dissolution of that simple unity is the result of the first experience; through this there is posited a pure self-consciousness, and a consciousness which is not purely for itself, but for another, i.e. as an existent consciousness, consciousness in the form and shape of thinghood. Both moments are essential, since, in the first instance, they are unlike and opposed, and their reflexion into unity has not yet come to light, they stand as two opposed forms or modes of consciousness. The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman.” —G.W.F. Hegel.
The master’s discourse is one of the most famous discourse that represents the relationship between the “master” (or lord) who beholds the master signifier, and the slave (bondsman) who works for the master. The master’s discourse is the first discourse Lacan formulated, where all subsequent discourses revolves around it through a “quarter turn”. When seen through sociological contexts, it is considered as one of the most important discourses in psychoanalysis as it imposes the master to the slave, neither of which would exist without each other.
Just as the capitalist discourse was not invented by Lacan but by Karl Marx, the master’s discourse was not invented by Lacan, but by G.W.F. Hegel. It originates from his book called Phenomenology of Spirit. In it, there is an essay where he spoke about the relationship between “Lordship and Bondsman”. Today, it is most famously known as the “Master-Slave dialectics”. It is an essay that influenced not only Lacan, but also Marx.
In this discourse, the master (S1) addresses the slave (S2) and tells him/her to work for them. During this process, the slave accumulates knowledge from his labour (S2) through work as a productive force, where he or she eventually acquires more knowledge about their work than their master. Meanwhile, the master might only know how to schedule work or tell the slave what to do. They only care about knowledge insofar that it helps him produce object a (i.e. the finished product at a job). As a result, the slave’s knowledge secretly liberates them from the master in the sense that they are the one who attains self-consciousness by recognizing their work was produced by their own hands, where they could do well even without the master’s presence. Meanwhile, the master remains stagnant, since they must rely on the slave’s knowledge to produce surplus value (a) for them.
On the other hand, the relationship between the master and other discourses can be seen across many different examples in real life. I will return to some of this later, but you can see this through the political discourse where the politician in power utters master signifiers as supporters nods their head because “the master said so”. The master may also take position through the university discourse as the professional who produces the audience as castrates subjects. They can also position as the master in charge through a military command center. We can also see this in some the relationships between the father and his children, where rules of the house are made simply because the father says so.
The master is like the shareholders of an engineering company who might understand very little about engineering that their employees attained through schooling and hard work. His or her workers builds and sells all the product which made the CEO and shareholders their wealth. As long as the company works as a whole and the CEO and shareholder’s wealth and power continues to grow, they are unconcerned about nuanced knowledge from other parts of the company. The master must never show weakness. They must always appear to others as complete uncastrated subjects, even when they are just like everyone else: a castrated being situated in language. This is why you see the split subject being repressed in the bottom left position under truth. In more extreme cases, the CEO might not even care much about their workers and only cares about them helping him or her make money (a).
If we take the master (signifier; S1) as the CEO or the capitalist, and the worker (S2) who works for the CEO that produces products to be sold, we end up with object a, the surplus value that gets produced, such as money and wealth; or the final product being produced that others who takes on the hysteric’s position might desire.
The University Discourse
“For centuries, knowledge has been a defense against truth”
—Lacan
If we consider this famous passage from Lacan, we will understand why Lacan places S1 (master signifier or truth) under the truth section of the university discourse. Unlike the master’s discourse, where the master (S1) takes position as the agent, we now have knowledge (S2) which beholds this same position.
In the university discourse, knowledge (S2) takes center stage and holds position as the agent who addresses his or her audience. Meanwhile, the audience functions as the unconscious subject (a) who are produced as split subjects by the professor that claims to be an expert in their field. Here, we can see how people are produced by the system to become the split subject.
While the university appears to teach and transfer knowledge, they are institutionalized within a system and it is what we can refer as “facts”. This mode of systemic institutionalized knowledge takes prominence over the master signifier or truth (S1). Knowledge that are disseminated and taught through the university discourse hides the truth of its own knowledge where they are actually incomplete.
Through the university discourse, the master signifier (S1) or truth gets repressed and put aside. We can think of the university professor who is giving a lecture on the history of war who actually do not know what they’re saying on an unconscious level. This is to say that it is his or her master signifiers that they cough up during a lecture that gets repressed, as they allow their knowledge take center stage. Perhaps the professor may reveal knowledge about the violent wars of 20th century and iterates how “unfortunate” (S1) society functioned under Hitler’s command. Yet, he represses the reason why he feels this way. Instead, he continues to produce knowledge about the World Wars to his students and ignores the significance of its “misfortunes”.
In the same way, the knowledge a scientist might claim to know are also incomplete knowledge caught up through the university discourse and methodologies. Science seeks for the totalization of knowledge where humans must know everything about the universe. It is believed that the university discourse is what mainstream science takes position in—though never entirely. As I will try to show later, to speak of knowledge and science in a different discourse is to dethrone it from its totalizing powers which may yield to genuine discoveries.
Similar to the historian at the university, the scientist presents facts and explanations to the causalities of the world by way of established systemic knowledge. Meanwhile, the unconscious subjects are the students who listens and obeys to the scientist’s field of knowledge which produces them as split subjects. They are bound to the knowledge being presented. Knowledge dominates the split subject and their perceptions of reality.
The university and master’s discourse goes hand in hand. Many scholars alike views the university discourse as the master’s handy man. We can look at it through the lens of Marx and how knowledge is used to produce and perpetuate ideologies of capital through the education system. It does so by rationalizing and justifying labour exploitation as the norm through teaching and reinforcing knowledge that pertains to capitalist ideologies. Such as it is to our best interest to go to school to become split subjects who produces capital and labour as the bondsman via the master’s discourse.
For Lacan, he goes further by pointing out how nearly the entire discipline of philosophy functions similar to the repressive masters discourse which dominates the split subject. It is not surprising that so many philosophers created their ideas through influences of their own lives; where their philosophies functions as their symptoms. Karl Marx, for example, produced his ground breaking truth positions through the critique of the capitalist political economy while living his life in poverty. Yet, it is through his analysis of capitalism which led to a new truth on the exploitation of labour which produced massive social movements around the world.
The university discourse is the place where split subjectivity is produced under a social context—like how a person learns the rules of their job and follows them (I spoke about this in my intro writings on the mirror stage). Knowledge defines the student and becomes the split subject, even when it functions as a form of repression that ignores the significance of the master signifier (S1; truth) which remains unconscious to them. The university discourse becomes a form of social control by using knowledge (or “facts”) as the law of the Other that domesticates the subject, making them obey and symptomatic. One can even say that the university discourse perpetuates ideologies so the subject won’t transgress the institution and break its rules. The split subjects are told to go school to acquire knowledge, find a job, but not to learn to think critically for themselves and who they really are.
It is no surprise that many university institutions today has come under scrutiny for being the dominant ideological machine behind “political oppression”, “brain washing”, among other things. We most often see it between the debates on “free speech” perpetuated by various political groups taking precedence within the education systems. You will hear public intellectuals talk about this in ways that are not associated with psychoanalysis, yet often falls inside its discourses. A famous example might be between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek where Peterson took position through the university discourse and Zizek as the hysteric (link).
It is thought that contemporary society functions through the university discourse where even the knowledge of some of the greatest anti-university/institution philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre becomes institutionalized and used as a way to domesticate the split subject. The easiest way to conceive of the university discourse is to think of it as society within the cultural sphere. For it is within this sphere where the knowledge of things like religion, science, economics, ideal beauty, and culture dominates society and its citizens.
The Hysteric’s Discourse
“All relationships are a sexual relationship.” —Sigmund Freud
Consider a casual encounter where a woman meets a man and they become friends. They talk to each other and the woman offers her charm by speaking to him. Unbeknownst to her, she tries to unconsciously figure out the cause of the man’s desires in his spoken words. She does so in order to respond to his words (desires) and have a normal conversation with him.
The woman incites the man with desire so he produces knowledge as he gets to know her. She does so by unconsciously asking him, “What do you want?”. The man eventually acknowledge her as the inaccessible object cause of his desires. Yet, the moment he tries to advance, she backs off where she realize she cannot endure becoming his object a. For she simply sees him as a friend. Something unconscious escapes, unrealized by both parties which produces all sorts of reactions.
Consequently, the man gets caught in the hysteric’s trap, who might get anxiety, frustrated, angry, where he might block her, unfollow her, or calls her out on her games. Or he might give up entirely and talks to another woman. The hysteric escapes the man’s knowledge. He does not know what he has to do to win her over. He may end up producing knowledge about her that continues to miss the point from the aimlessness of his desires. He speaks, but never knows what he meant to say on an unconscious level.
What we see in this common scenario is the hysteric’s discourse in action. Through conversation, the hysteric/woman ($) unconsciously challenges the man (S1) by getting him to show her what he’s got by way of his knowledge (S2). The man becomes like a bird who must spread his wings to show off his feathers/master signifiers to the woman. The man must hold himself as the master (S1) of sorts, a professional, or an expert in something, even if it is a knowledge that he might not even have.
The hysteric’s discourse reveals the question of knowledge (S2). If the product from every discourse represents the experience of jouissance, then we can say that the hysteric “gets off” on the man’s knowledge, but only more positively if he produces the “right” sets of knowledge and signifiers that unconsciously responds to the lack in her subjectivity (i.e. object a positioned as her repressed truth). This is what was implied in Clinical Contexts, Theory, and Practice, when I mentioned how the hysteric seeks for a master, someone imbued with power and knowledge.
When signifiers or knowledge produced unconsciously finds common ground, the hysteric will take up on the lack for the Other’s knowledge. She deceives the knowledge produced from the Other by finding the lack in it and takes up this place unconsciously. Perhaps this may explain why intelligence had always been an universally attractive experience for many women. The hysteric’s discourse revolves around forcing the production of new knowledge from the man’s master signifier (S1) and getting off from it.
While I am using a common example to showcase the hysteric’s discourse, S1 can be anything one can think of depending on context. S1 can represent the significant other, a university teacher, science, or even socio-cultural and religious practices.
Within a clinical setting, treating a hysteric by producing knowledge about her symptoms leads to falling into the hysteric’s trap. As mentioned inmy previous writings, one way the analyst deals with this is by not taking position as S1 in the hysteric’s discourse. Instead, they must become object a and force the hysteric into the analyst discourse and make them question the ambiguities of their thoughts.
Another popular method is silence. By remaining silent and become a form of nothingness, the analyst does not answer to the challenge of the hysteric’s symptoms of “What do you want?”. Instead, it attempts to reverse their question from “What do you want?”, to “What do I really want?”. For even the hysteric escapes her own knowledge while she plays on the role of the Other’s desires.
By placing the hysteric ($) in the analyst discourse, it forces her to produce her own master signifiers (the unconscious truth) instead of anchoring to the Other’s master signifiers that are produced by the man’s desires. To say that the hysteric escapes her knowledge is to say she embodies the ability to transgress the Other’s knowledge, that is the Other’s language or what is consciously known to her and the Other. The hysteric is someone who must discover the underlying truth of her desires through said knowledge. This is why hysteria is considered as the fundamental position of neurosis.
Most importantly, the hysteric’s discourse is the complete opposite of the university discourse. Where knowledge (S2) takes the center stage as agent and the master signifier (S1) gets repressed in the truth position, the hysteric places knowledge (S2) as product and puts the master signifiers the university represses into questioning. Simply put, the hysteric poses a direct challenge and threat to the university discourse by attempting to contest its established knowledge. The hysteric forces out the truth of knowledge from the university discourse. Such as the inherent incompleteness or lack in knowledge that is found through science and many other disciplines. It forces out why the university professor disseminated the knowledge of World War I and II and what was truly “unfortunate” about it.
Moreover, if we consider science as the university discourse, a good example would be how hysterics will often present psychosomatic symptoms unexplainable through science. On a psychic level, the hysteric’s bodily symptoms had always deceived medical knowledge. She may display symptoms of illnesses without actually being ill in any biological way (Anna O is a famous example of this). The hysteric’s symptoms lives outside of scientific medical history and much of university knowledge. Where obsessive neurotics presents their symptoms through thinking/thought, the hysteric will present her symptoms through her body which serves as the canvas for signifiers unexplainable by modern scientific practices; just as tattoos are for the naked body, and language is to the mind.
Unlike the university discourse, the hysteric is not a totalizing subject. She does not know what she really wants. Someone or something who takes position as S1 master (signifier) must offer her knowledge and tell her what she wants—such as her partner, friends, parents, contemporary culture, or even an advertisement. She must also be able to find the lack in the master’s knowledge to anchor her subjectivity. And what she unconsciously responds to from this knowledge speaks to her symptoms to what she unconsciously wants. Hence we see object a being repressed in the truth position.
As mentioned earlier, the scientific discipline more often takes position through the university discourse that seeks to totalize knowledge, where everything can be known and met with absolute certainty. Yet, most scientists knows something always escapes their knowledge. There is a truth beyond the knowledge of science that is yet to know.
The Analyst’s Discourse
“I know that I know nothing” —Socrates
In the hysteric’s discourse, I spoke of the hysteric as split subject ($) who is forced into the analyst discourse under the clinical context as the other ($), where she is required to cough up her own master signifiers instead of abiding to the Other’s signifiers (or the Other’s desires). The analyst attempts to make the hysteric put their own desires into scrutiny and get her to analyze it.
Through the Freudian slip, the analyst’s goal is to help the analysand/hysteric reveal the ambiguities of her master signifiers. Perhaps she might had said something by accident where it wasn’t an accident. Such as accidentally saying “yes” and meant no, implying that she unconsciously wanted to say “yes”. While the analysand may think her spoken words points to specific meanings, many of these “mistakes” are not errors. They are slips of the tongue that points to unconscious desires and meanings unbeknownst to her where they may come to reveal itself as metaphors. Where the hysteric challenges the university discourse, the analyst discourse challenges the hysteric’s discourse.
In the discourse of the analyst, the analyst thwarts the mastery of knowledge and words the hysteric analysand speaks. The analyst must not take on the hysteric’s challenge where they function as S1. They must occupy the space of object a in the agent’s position so to refuse to provide definitive meanings to the analysand’s desires (i.e. their words). Only in this way will it allow her unconscious to unfold.
A popular example is from Ancient Greek philosopher Socrates who famously claimed he “knows nothing” as he walked around the streets of Athens inquiring knowledge from everyday citizens (known as the “Socratic walk”). Just as the psychoanalyst doesn’t actually “know nothing”, Socrates perfectly knew many things about worldly matters and pursued mastery in numerous topics. But since the analyst/Socrates holds the position of object a which causes desire—a desire that is fundamentally aimless—the analyst/Socrates must never really know what they are doing or saying on some level. They must be aimless in their engagements with the analysand/citizens (hysteric) so to thwart the knowledge that the analysand/citizens produces. In essence, the famous Socratic philosophical practice of him wandering the streets of Athens and learning from regular citizens is a metaphor for the analytic discourse. As Lacan once said, it is from the analysand where he learns what psychoanalysis really is; just as Socrates did with philosophy through talking to citizens.
By contrast, the analyst discourse opposes the master or professor in the university discourse. Where the master and university professor functions as the expert or professional who knows his or her knowledge who may dominate the subject, the analyst must play the part who knows nothing. Thus you see knowledge (S2) in the bottom left corner in the analyst discourse being repressed. At the same time, this nothingness the analyst takes position of resembles a truth that lives beyond both analyst’s and analysand’s conscious knowing. And it is from this place of nothingness which allows the analysand to produce their own truth—that is the master signifier of S1 in the bottom right corner. It is also this gesture which highlights the ethics of psychoanalysis. For it is not the job of the analyst to tell the analysand what or how they should desire. The analysand must produce their own truths and discover what they desire through free association.
Certainly, it is common for experienced analysts to see the analysand’s unconscious desires long before the analysand realizes it. But this doesn’t mean the analyst should reveal their knowledge to them, for they know that they know nothing. If the analyst tells them, it may lead to denial and situate the analyst in the university discourse. And if such knowledge is revealed, it would be intentional on the analyst’s part, where it becomes a question of analytic techniques. The analysand must discover this truth for themselves which reveals through metaphors. At times, what the analysts sees might also not be what the analysand ends up discovering, for it could be counter transference and projection on their part.
Unlike traditional fields today, where trainees in mainstream therapeutic practices and psychologies are required to partake and pass multiple exams to qualify as a working professional in their field. In Lacanian school, the trainee must testify via “La Pass” (The Pass), where they go through clinical psychoanalysis as the analysand. In order for you to become a psychoanalyst, you must get psychoanalyzed.
Ironically, while the training analyst are classified as a “professional” once they succeed, they are to embody the opposite position to the professional expert that is found in the master and university discourses. For they must testify and learn how to become someone who knows nothing. As mentioned before, the job of the psychoanalyst is to become a good listener and read between the lines. It is to listen to the unconscious through someone’s words. The psychoanalyst must learn to bare the nothingness of their own being through the symbolic, so to speak. For it is only by providing this barrenness can the analysand’s unique subjective truth emerge during analysis.
As Bruce Fink once pointed out, the analysand often visits a psychoanalyst when they have a “crisis of satisfaction”, even if they almost always unconsciously finds satisfaction in things they consciously think are unsatisfactory. Like the man who repeatedly treated his girlfriend the same way his father treated his mother, where the death drive grips his desires. Only through analytic process and the experience of love can overcome this repetition. At the end of analysis, the split subject produces a more directed or determined desire that cannot be swayed and influenced by the Other’s desires. Their unconscious desires are no longer inhibited, but are to be understood, expressed, felt, and successfully articulated from the real into the symbolic.
Suturing the Cause: Science, Knowledge, and Truth
“Swear to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, the whole truth, and that is precisely what will not be said. If the subject has the slightest idea of it, that is precisely what he will not say.” —Lacan
So far, I offered a brief overview on how the master’s discourse utilizes the university discourse as their assistant to produce object a. One common way this object takes form as is knowledge that is disseminated through the university. I also showed you how desire functions through these different discourses produces various outcomes for the split subject, such as the relationship between the hysteric’s discourse and how it challenges the university and master’s discourse. But what does any of this say in regards to the scientific endeavors we see today? What is truth and how is it different from knowledge?
As a discipline, science produces knowledge about our world. It shows us how everything in our daily lives works and why it works the way it does. It can even explain how we behave and why certain thoughts, feelings, and emotions overtakes us. Science attempts to explain material causalities of many phenomena we experience. These knowledge appears to us as facts which shapes our narratives around us. We may even erroneously perceive such knowledge as truth, even if it functions through the university discourse that domesticates our world views. If one wishes to see beyond a scientific context or what they know, they must dethrone science and knowledge as their master and institution.
Unlike philosophers, psychoanalysts, and poets, rarely do scientists attempts to answer the question of truth. For most of them, knowledge stands in place for truth through the university discourse. Yet, one can easily find scientific studies which produces knowledge that disagree and contradict each other in many academic fields today. The most well known being the “Replication Crisis” where many research in disciplines such as psychology, medicine, economics, and many more, cannot be replicated with the same outcomes (link). And if they cannot be replicated, then they do not hold water as a science. And however many explanations there are of its probable causes, they are merely a suturing of its cause—that is to bridge the gap between cause and effect.
Similarly, the subject in Cartesian philosophy is like the scientist who doubts everything as a way to get at the foundations for what they know. For Rene Descartes, what remains at the end of doubting is the certainty of consciousness which allows for our subjective experience of reality. Without it, there would be nothing to discuss in the first place. Yet till this day, we still do not know if it is our brain neurons firing that causes consciousness as scientists would think (materialism), or if it is our consciousness that allows one to observe neurons firing during a brain scan and produce knowledge out of it (idealism). For example, how can our non-physical or immaterial mental thought of “scratching my back” lead to the physical action of us scratching our back? Today in neuroscience, this is known as “the hard problem of consciousness”. It talks about how there is a gap between physical brain activities and subjective conscious experience. We don’t really know how our non-physical thoughts, imaginations, feelings, senses, and emotions correlates to physical processes of the brain. Nevertheless, it is through the method of doubt where Descartes’ famously claims, “I think therefore I am” to suggest that consciousness is non-physical as it serves as the foundation for knowledge.
Just like the subject who doubts and discovers the wonders of the world, science focuses on what works and why everything works the way they do and builds upon said knowledge. It seeks to explain and bridge the gap between cause and effect, on how specific phenomena takes place, such as consciousness; but it never brings in the question of cause. That is the cause for their knowledge and their desires for it.
The modern scientific method is determined by a set of rules, known knowledge or facts, thesis, and empirical evidence. It is also largely dominated by sets of true and false propositions. Within its discourse, there is a third term that disrupts scientific attempts to totalize reality and breakthrough its already existing knowledge. This third term is the function of truth that ruptures from the unconscious. Truth causes the production of new knowledge in consciousness. Where the Cartesian subject says, “I think therefore I am”, the psychoanalyst says “I am thinking therefore I am not”, or “I think where I do not think I am thinking”.
Contemporary science fails to account for psychoanalytic observations like the hysteric’s psychosomatic symptoms where it disrupts reality beyond material causal explanations. Science also fails to see the “impossible” that ruptures from common causalities of everyday life that they are so good at explaining. Where science deals with totalizing reality by explaining everything and bridging cause and effect, psychoanalysis studies the impossibilities of reality. It studies the truth which disrupts established knowledge of conscious experiences on what we perceive as real.
While science studies what works, psychoanalysis, as Fink might put it, studies what does not work. It studies the failure of knowledge and not its completeness found in university discourse. A scientist may conduct a thousand experiments where only one “succeeds”, even when it is this one success that represents the failure of their knowledge that had been produced out of previous attempts. Just as love is the unconscious failure of the social bond which bridges the difference between the One and the Other, there is truth only in the sense that our everyday knowledge falls out of our expectations and surprises us in ways we don’t anticipate.
Psychoanalysis emphasizes on truth which ruptures and changes how one might perceive a set of knowledge determined by the Other who shapes reality. The impossible falls outside of conscious knowledge on what humans already know about the world and themselves. It is like the discoveries made by Galileo on heliocentrism of the solar system, or Newton’s discovery of gravity from an apple that fell on his head—only so that Newton’s ideas would be challenged by Einstein’s General Relativity.
Unlike knowledge, truth disrupts our experiences of reality. Instead of rejecting or dismissing occurring unexplainable phenomena, genuine scientific practice must adapt and account for these anomalies in their modes of thought. For if science is about groundbreaking inventions and discoveries of new knowledge, it would be these new impossibilities that ruptures from our unconscious; from what turns life upside down that changes our relations with the world. The rupture of truth forces science to account for new knowledge that had yet been considered outside its own set of expectations of what reality “is”.
If conventional science takes place through the master and university discourse where all knowledge is contained and explained through cause and effect, it makes hysteria the one true scientific discourse. In genuine scientific work, science belongs to the hysteric’s discourse where one challenges established knowledge and its underlying incompleteness. Hysteria is what allows the discovery and invention of new knowledge that lies outside (repressed) of what we already know in the university discourse.
Perhaps this may explain why psychoanalysis had always fallen outside of mainstream scientific practice through its studies of the hysteric’s discourse. Yet it still doesn’t completely fall out of genuine scientific practices that accounts for the impossible. Physics and quantum physics are among many disciplines that falls in line with studying “impossible” phenomena. Just as our knowledge of a black hole remains unknown in our fabric of spacetime, truth too, functions like a hole in our established knowledge. It is contingent, absolute, and singular.
Love, Beauty, and the Shift of Discourse
“Love is a sign that one is changing discourse.” —Lacan
Perhaps one of the most important questions to ask is, what allows the subject to change discourse? What makes the hysteric, who gets caught up in their dominant position of hysteria, change into an analyst discourse? While in our every day lives, one may speak through each of these discourses in different situations, to shift from one dominant discourse to another marks a significant event.
In the same way that the shift in discourse allows the subject to produce something new, something unfamiliar and different, love too, produces this same effect. It is indeed, the experience of love which marks the shift in discourse. But just as truth can only be “half-said” through split subjectivity, love too, can only ever be half-said.
Just like a baby who cries in order to draw attention and demand for love from their parents. Speech is a cry driven by our desires to be loved. When one speaks, they are “crying” for the other’s attention and love. This is why Freud speaks of all relationships as a form of sexual relationship. That a conversation between two people are really two cries in a metaphorical sense. It is two people articulating metaphors and metonymy infinitely looped, unconscious to the speakers.
To speak of love and desire via the imaginary and symbolic is to understand it as intertwined like two rings wrapped around by a third ring that consists of the real, forming the Borromean knot. If any of these rings did not exist, then neither will the other two rings will be connected. These rings would connect and keep each other tied up forming the “ring of strings”. They become signifying knots tied together infinitely, representing signifiers linked to other signifiers through speech.
When Lacan viewed the speaking subject as castrated and alienated subject, he implied the movement of signifiers through the Other’s language which riddles them with their symptoms. Every word is chained up to the next word where desire speaks. Yet, desire is always driven by object a that remains unconscious. To reveal parts of it is like the discovery or invention of a truth that produces new knowledge through castration. But just because truths can only be half-said does not mean it doesn’t produce any meaningful impact in one’s life.
We can reconsider the university professor who thinks under the dominance of the university discourse. While he might see the events of Hitler as “unfortunate” (S1; master signifier), even when what was unfortunate was the way he grew up under tyranny in his home country which led to the death of his father. What was first displayed as a lecture to his students where knowledge took centre stage suddenly gets boots off stage and becomes the product in the hysteric’s discourse. That is, it was for his love of his father which led him into his own becoming. Now imagine this being a half-said truth!
Through the experience of love, the professor who, at the beginning displayed knowledge and repressed truth (S1, his master signifiers), changes discourse and becomes the hysteric who produces knowledge about these repressed master signifiers that he had been spewing out. Truth disrupts the linearity of his knowledge in history and his entire life studies in academia. It is a truth ruptured from a history that is uniquely his own.
Discourse also shows us how social dynamics takes place. Let us imagine an arguing couple, where one speaks through the university discourse as knowledge dominates over the real truth. If their partner responded by also taking position within the same discourse who articulates an opposing set of knowledge, would the argument not heat up further? In the same way, the argument would also continue if the partner spoke from a masters discourse where knowledge is rendered less useful simply because the “master said so”. Even if what they said makes no sense. But what if the partner speaks from the analyst or the hysterics discourse? Instead of arguing using knowledge, reason, or whatever at disposal against the same discourse, what if one provokes the underlying cause of said knowledge by speaking through another discourse? Would it not diffuse the situation instead of escalating the argument? Would it not also possibly produce the effects of love? In common day language, we can say that if no one backs down in a conflict, or know how to work through the other’s knowledge and assumptions, no relationship would work. By backing down a certain discourse and engaging on a different ground, the outcome might be very different.
Our self-perceived fulfilled experiences of knowledge are always filled or plugged up by the Other’s desires between the imaginary and symbolic; between the real and the One. This is part of why Lacan used mathematical symbols or “mathemes” to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge. He was aware of the infinite possibilities and how his words are understood was dependent on all the transferences and imaginary projections of each individual audience/reader. Hence he attempts to transmit psychoanalytic knowledge through mathematical symbols and graphs because they signify no mythical meanings.
Fink once brought up an example where the analysand asked the analyst, “Why did you say what you said last time?”, where the analysand implied the analyst said something hurtful or wrong. Instead of engaging the analysand directly where the analyst explains his or her reasons or saying “I don’t mean to be critical” which reinforces their intentions, the analyst can ask, “What did you think I should have said?” which attempts to get at underlying projections of the analysand. Perhaps their projections stems from their parents who were critical of them when they were young. Or maybe it is from their previous relationships. Here, we can see how the analyst is partaking in the analyst discourse where he knows nothing and assumes nothing. The analysand is interpreting the analyst’s words through what his or her desires wishes to read, something that is all too common in our everyday lives. One must never assume what the other heard.
Love reveals the shift in discourse. Now imagine someone like the professor, or even myself, who is the man in the university discourse that carries vast bodies of knowledge (S2) and engages their romantic interest (a). In it, he treats his romantic other (a) as a subject for study by trying to analyze and understand them (S2). Through this process, his desire for the other (a) becomes intellectualized where she is rationalized into a list of who he thinks she is. Perhaps his interpretations are sharp, accurate, where he does in some sense, understand her. Yet, his interpretations of her does not oblige him to understand anything at all. The act of understanding is a defense against truth (S1), where he produces her as a castrated subject ($) and dominates her unconscious position with knowledge. As a result, she might end up becoming confused, alienated, and may feel misunderstood from his knowledge that are favored over his repressed desires hidden in his master signifiers (S1). Hence the more the man produces knowledge about her, the more he might push her away. For while he spends all his time understanding her, he represses the truth (S1) of his knowledge that he desires and loves her.
Through the event of love which introduces a radical contingency, the university discourse breaks down where he shifts into the analyst discourse. His love for the woman can no longer be sustained in established systemic knowledge. He partakes in the lover’s discourse, as Roland Barthes might say (it’s a famous book). He changes from knowing the woman (S2) into becoming a full fledged desiring subject (a) who desires her ($) in the analyst discourse. Where he used to produce knowledge about her and believes he understands her, she now becomes his cause for pure desire. She transforms into the mysterious woman who he no longer understands. He goes from “I know everything about her” to “I know that I know nothing about her”. He moves from being a master who “thinks” he sees everything, into the desiring subject who realizes he actually sees nothing.
In the analyst discourse, love (a) allows him to engage the woman where she is divided as castrated being ($). Instead of understanding her through his knowledge (S2) and producing her (a) as a castrated subject ($) in the university discourse, his desires (a) now directly addresses her existing castration ($) in the analyst discourse—that is her split subjectivity and who she really is as a person. It allows him to confront what she does not have, such as things that might be broken in her, her imperfections, or what lies behind her beauty and incompleteness, and not where established knowledge dominates her being. Hence we see knowledge (S2) getting repressed in the bottom left corner in the analyst discourse. As a result, new master signifiers and truths are produced (S1) where the two subjects fosters a new truth together that rewrites their symbolic lives. Perhaps one might think this new truth implies a happily ever after where they build a new life together, even when it could reveal the opposite; or shift the ways both individuals desire. Love becomes a construction of a new truth, as Alain Badiou puts it, but not always in ways we expect.
While every discourse produces a unique form of truth that can be all too familiar to us, to produce a radically new truth requires one to change discourse. There is truth only because there is love. To say that love is a “sign” that one is changing discourse is to recognize love as the symptom of split subjectivity. Love is the byproduct produced through the displacement of discourses as powered by transference. It requires the split subject to give up on something as they partake in different positions (S1, S2, a, or $). Similar to truth that functions like a hole in knowledge, love is a failure of the social bond where their discourse is no longer adequate to account for the relationship. Hence it must change where new truths are created.
Above all, this new truth produced can only be metaphorically expressed in three words: “I love you”. It is no longer an “I love you because I understand you with my knowledge” as seen in the university discourse. Rather, it is, “I love you because I know nothing about you where you turn my world upside down”. Through love, all symbolic, systemic, ideological, economical, cultural and established knowledge falls apart and rewrites itself. Where the university discourse represses and carries the illusion of completeness in knowledge, the analyst discourse is incomplete and vulnerable as he or her knows nothing. Love breaks down the all-knowing institutionalized knowledge, moving the subject into uncharted territory of their unconscious desires. Love and truth becomes the failure of knowledge which may come to surprise us. Many scholars talks about the significance of the master and university discourse and their relationship with capitalism, even when it is the analyst discourse that turns heads.
When one loves, one also falls in love with the unconscious. This is why every time love occurs between two people, they may find themselves in the analyst discourse. For if desire and love are two sides of the same coin, then the analyst is not only the cause for the analysand’s desire, they are also the cause for their love. This is why in a successful analysis, the analysand will often fall in love with the psychoanalyst before they love anyone new outside of analysis (you also see this phenomenon in popular therapy practices). Yet the analyst must always say no to this love, even if love is always mutual. By saying no, the analyst submits to the Freudian cause. For psychoanalysis is a cure through love. And it is through this love where the analysand invents a new love and a new truth which rewrites their symbolic life. Love is the cause of psychoanalysis!
Discourse does not escape the movement between desire/love, metonymy/metaphor which represents the infinite movement of our thoughts. In order for us to produce any forms of truth, it can only be recognized as a metaphor which pertains to a half-said. In order for us to express our love, it too, can only be articulated through the metaphor, where our knowledge, projections, and assumptions about the other must be put aside and emptied out as new knowledge and truth unfolds. Similarly, the experience of beauty also functions like truth and love.
Many scientists today studies why, how, and what attributes makes people attractive. They study face shapes, facial features, body types, and traits on what constitutes ideal beauty. But what if they are missing the point like how our desire and knowledge misses the truth? What if they are wrong? Unlike lust which fuels our desires from the other person’s attributes, beauty stops our desires. It isn’t uncommon for people to perceive real beauty as angelic or as an innocent experience, like the woman who mesmerizes us with her green eyes and black hair, as opposed to her body which evokes sexual desires. The beautiful person becomes “untouchable” because they are pure and innocent, so to speak.
Unlike the body, beauty does not turn us on sexually. It forbids our desires. Lacan saw beauty belonging to the real, where he claimed as opposite to what we perceive. To witness beauty is to say that one unconsciously realizes an underlying truth that may come to surprise us—something that is considered ugly by the Other, such as the ideals set by our cultures. Just like the experience of love and truth, beauty is like a master signifier that stops our desires in its tracks.
Contemporary culture (the Other) makes us believe beauty lies in what meets the eye, whether it be defined by the sciences or social media. At times, it also makes us believe we are never good enough. In a world where people strive to become the perfect woman or man, perhaps beauty can only be seen when two people are in love who sees each other’s imperfections as perfect. Maybe it’s their crooked nose, their imperfect teeth, their lack of hair, or their esoteric and quirky character. When we love someone, we love them for who they are, where we wouldn’t change anything about them. We love what’s in someone more than our knowledge of them. After all, to love is to engage with the other’s lack and see what they do not have.
Yet beauty can also resemble to perversion. For when we see beauty about someone which pertains to knowledge, such as her perfect breasts, his perfect six pack, her lips, maybe their clothes, or even their money, we get caught up in the knowledge of someone—that is the university discourse (or even the master’s discourse). This is to say that the university discourse is perverse in that the person focuses on attributes of the person instead of the person. They fetishize certain knowledge (S2) about them just like the person who fetishize specific body parts. While human sexuality always carries a perverse dimension, it is often thought by many analysts that society has become increasingly perverse (we see this interpretation by Karl Marx when he spoke about the fetish commodity). Today, many might find themselves caught up on certain qualities of someone over who they are. We may even lose interest the moment someone isn’t like what we thought or how the Other defines beauty. We are even convinced by our cultures to search for the person who fits us perfectly, even when love only happens when things don’t quite fit.
Slavoj Zizek once pointed out the difference between the pervert and the analyst discourse lies in the pervert whose object a takes form as empirical content (i.e. the butt, abs, breasts, legs, money, etc.) whereas in the analyst’s discourse, object a remains indeterminate as pure desire. This is why Zizek points out how if you have a reason to love someone, then you don’t love them. The moment one has a reason for their love, it becomes a knowledge which takes the form of perversion. We no longer love someone for who they are, but we love something about them. This position is identical to Jacques Derrida who once addressed the question of love (link) and what threatens its fidelity: Do we love someone, or do we love something about someone?
Poetry, Metaphors, and the Movement of Infinities
“The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom.” —Lacan
The movement between discourses and its production of truths reveals insights on how social dynamics work on an unconscious level. It shows us how each person engage with others in their lives. Discourse shows us how new knowledge and truths are produced. With the most powerful of all recognized through the change of discourses, ignited by the experience of love as the subject’s symptom. When people say that “love changes people”, what really changes is discourse and the truths being produced.
Psychoanalysis studies the impossibilities of reality and experiences. The half-said of truth and love found through the movement of discourses are only some of its foremost examples. How can we speak of truth if it can only ever be half-said? How can we declare our love when there is only half of it? This is the structure of desire, love, and its impossibility.
Beauty, truth, and love had always been experiences tied to the infinite movements of human expressions. We can see them when we are in love with someone; we see it in poetry, in art, music, speech, and all the random moments of our lives most of us never pays attention to. Perhaps when one speaks of infinity, we think of all the impossible experiences beyond human reach, like our expanding universe, where something lies beyond its limit. In psychoanalysis, infinity had always been expanding in our grasp through our acts of expression—through speaking, being, and loving. It is represented through our endless shift between discourses and as we articulate endless signifiers as metaphors. While we are finite beings throughout our lives who will all one day die, we embody the infinities of expression.
Unsurprisingly, it is agreed by intellectuals that poetry is the source for the experience of infinity. We can even say that poetry is the proper response to love as metaphor for the infinities produced by each and one of us. Certainly, many of us can find beauty in poetic words. For they are riddled with infinite numbers of metaphors that are used to represent other meanings, and even more metaphors unique to our interpretations, where our transferences and projections are tied together. It is like music or a book which may carry meanings that turns our world upside down; or the university professor who confesses his love for his father; or two people who meets by chance and produces love.
Poetry, like metaphor, like love and truth, appears before us when we least expect it. Perhaps this is why humans had always been fond of the poet, someone who today, has dwindled into nothing but an engagement with capital where metaphors are produced to make money. But even our most popular music and poems can reveal much about us under an event proper. For little do we realize we embody language like poetry embodies metaphors. Human subjectivity is the metaphor for poetry. Only that we are the poem, not the poet. For the poet is actually not the author, but an unconscious affect produced through the Other’s language. The poet is the poem who gets written through the symbolic Other.
Thus, poetry and metaphors can be found in ways one might not realize, where they had been there all along without our conscious recognition—like our love for someone when we first meet them, or the man who treated his girlfriends the same way his father treated his mother. The experience of poetry and metaphor is the movement of infinities through each and one of us. When we discover them, they dismantle what we think we know about the other, ourselves, and the world.
Perhaps many of us had met a special person who changed us, made us stronger, and smarter. They may had even thrown us into the abyss, confused us, and broke us. But there is still nothing like the experience of love where metaphors grapples us into the depths of meanings, allowing for new truths and meanings to emerge. There is art. There is beauty, truth, and love. There is also the body and our sexual desires. While desire dominates us through the Other’s language, they are riddled with metaphors. And it is only a matter of events where we might discover them and find ourselves anchored in its meanings which marks its shift in discourse.
When our expressions moves between desire and love; when a special person dances in our thoughts; when the barren land of destitution speaks to us; when the metaphor surprises and signifies; and when the real crashes upon our symbolic world, one cannot help but signify infinitely unto death. Through falling in love or saying goodbye, or enduring inevitable experiences, one may mark the shift in discourse and change how we bond with others and see the world. For here too, one finds infinity.
To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.
