Louis Althusser (1918–1990)

Closely associated with the period of high structuralism in 1960s France, Louis Althusser was one of the most significant Marxist philosophers of the

twentieth century. Born in Birmendreis, Algeria in 1918, he moved to France with his family in 1930 and shortly thereafter pursued his lycée studies in

Lyon. In 1939, he was admitted to the école Normale Supérieure, but his education was deferred when he was called up for military service. He spent the

majority of the war in a German prisoner of war camp, a period that was formative for his own sense of political solidarity and his nascent Communist

sympathies. In 1948, he passed the agrégation exam and also joined the French Communist Party, thus officially launching his dual career as a teacher

of philosophy and an engaged Party intellectual. For more than thirty years, Althusser served as the agrégé-répétiteur, or caïman, at the ENS, the

instructor charged with preparing students for the agrégation. This institutional base meant that scores of post-war French philosophers and intellectuals

were exposed to and influenced by his teaching. For many years, Althusser suffered from periodic bouts of manic-depressive illness that interrupted his

work and which tragically resulted in the strangling of his wife in 1980. Althusser spent the remaining decade of his life in and out of hospitals before his

death in 1990.

Althusser’s decisive influence on the editors of the Cahiers was a result of his philosophical intervention in Marxism over the course of the 1960s.

Beginning with his article ‘On the Young Marx’ (1961), Althusser produced a series of critical essays which responded to the ongoing work of de-

Stalinization with a refusal to return to the Hegelian humanism of Marx’s youth and a radical insistence on the scientific quality of Marx’s work in Capital,

as opposed to all forms of ideological mystification. Central to Althusser’s project was the claim that an epistemological break separated the young from

the mature Marx, a break which correlated to the distinction between ideology and science. Moreover, Althusser’s critique of the Hegelian elements of

Marxism specifically targeted the concept of expressive causality that lay at the centre of a teleological model of history driven by an effectively absolute

subject (the proletariat). Against this framework, Althusser developed a theory of structural causality and argued for a conception of a history as a

‘process without asubject’. Inspired by Lacan’s return to Freud, Althusser conceived of his return to Marx in similar terms, attempting to supplant a

substantive theory of (class) consciousness with a structural theory of determinant relations. After the publication in 1965 of For Marx, a collection of his

articles, and Reading Capital, the results of his seminar on Marx’s masterpiece, Althusser began a more sustained inquiry into the nature

of discourse and the conceptual relations among philosophy, science, and ideology. These investigations were undertaken in collaboration with his

current and former students, among which figured Alain Badiou and Yves Duroux and other contributors to the Cahiers. He published in the Cahiers the

text of one of his lessons on Rousseau,a lesson which displayed the fecundity of Althusser’s method of ‘symptomatic reading’. Althusser’s later work

would be marked by a series of ‘auto-critiques’ and suggestive, if under-developed avenues for further research. In many ways, however, the Cahiers can

be read as the critical development of Althusser’s own intellectual itinerary when it was at its most robust. As such, they are a lasting testament to the

lines of inquiry opened by his work and his teaching.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Louis Althusser, ‘Sur le Contrat Social (Les décalages)’, CpA 8.1

[HTML] [PDF] [SYN]

Select bibliography

Journal de captivité (Stalag XA 1940-45). Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992.

‘L’internationale des bons sentiments’ (1946). In Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I. Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994. ‘The International of Decent Feelings’,

trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997.

‘Du contenu dans la pensée de G.W.F. Hegel’ (1947). In Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I. Paris: Stock/IMEC 1994. ‘On Content in the Thought of

G.W.F. Hegel’ trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings.London: Verso, 1997.

‘Le retour à Hegel. Dernier mot du révisionisme universitaire’ (1950). La Nouvelle Critique 20 (1950). ‘The Return of Hegel: The Latest Word in Academic

Revisionism’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997.

‘à propos du marxisme’ (1953). Revue de l’enseignement philosophique. 3:4 (1953): 15-19. ‘On Marxism’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Spectre of Hegel:

Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997.

‘Note sur le matérialisme dialectique’ (1953). Revue de l’enseignement philosophique, 3:5 (1953): 11-17. ‘On Marxism’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The

Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings. London: Verso, 1997.

Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959. ‘Montesquieu: Politics and History’, trans. Ben Brewster, Politics and

History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx. London: Verso, 2007.

‘Les Manifestes philosophiqes de Feuerbach’, La Nouvelle Critique 121 (1960): 32-38. ‘Feuerbach’s Philosophical Manifestoes’, trans. Ben Brewster, For

Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969.

‘Sur le jeune Marx (Questions de théorie)’, La Pensée 96 (1961): 3-26. ‘On the Young Marx: Theoretical Questions’, trans. Ben Brewster, For

Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969.

‘Contradiction et surdetermination (Notes pour un recherche)’, La Pensée 106 (1962): 5-46. ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination: Notes for an

Investigation’, trans. Ben Brewster,For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1969.

‘Marxisme et humanisme’. Cahiers de l’Institut des Sciences économique Appliquées 20 (1964): 109-133. ‘Marxism and Humanism’, trans. Ben Brewster

in For Marx. London New Left Books, 1969.

‘Sur la dialectique matérialiste (De l’inégalité des origines)’. La Pensée 110 (1963): 5-46. ‘On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Origins’,

trans. Ben Brewster, For Marx.London: Verso 2005.

‘Freud et Lacan’. La Nouvelle Critique 161-162 (1964–1965): 88-108. ‘Freud and Lacan’, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays.

New York: Monthly Review, 2002.

Lire le Capital, Tome 1 and 2, with étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Rancière. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Reading Capital,

trans. Ben Brewster (contributions of Establet, Macherey, and Rancière omitted). London: New Left Books, 1970 .

‘Theory, Theoretical Practice and Theoretical Formation’ (1965), trans. James Kavanaugh, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists,

ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

‘Sur Lévi-Strauss’ (1966). In écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997. ‘On Lévi-Strauss’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The

Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003.

‘Conjuncture philosophique et recherche théorique marxiste’(1966). In écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1997. ‘The

Philosophical Conjuncture and Marxist Theoretical Research’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso

2003.

‘Trois notes sur la théorie du discours’(1966). In Ecrits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1993. ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourse’, trans.

G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003.

Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants (1967), Paris: Maspero, 1974. ‘Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists’ trans.

Warren Montag, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

‘Du côté de la philosophie (Cinquième cours de philosophie pour scientifiques)’ (1967). In écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 2. Paris: Stock/IMEC,

1997.

‘La tâche historique de la philosophie marxiste’ (1967). ‘The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy’, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, The Humanist Controversy

and Other Writings. London: Verso 2003.

‘Lenine et la Philosophie’, Bulletin de la Société de Philosophie 4 (1968): 127-181; ‘Lenin and Philosophy’, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy

and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002.

‘Sur le rapport de Marx à Hegel’. In Hegel et la pensée moderne, ed. Jacques l’Hondt. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970. ‘Marx’s Relation to

Hegel’, trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002.

‘Ideologie et appareils idéologiques d’état (notes pour une recherche)’ La Pensée 151 (1970): 3-38. ‘Ideology and Ideology and Ideological State

Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation’ trans. Ben Brewster, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review 2002.

Élements d’autocritique. Paris: Hachette 1974. ‘Elements of Self-Criticism’, trans. Grahame Lock, Essays in Self-Criticism. London: New Left Books,

1976.

‘Est-il simple d’être marxiste en philosophie?’ (Soutenance d’Amiens) La Pensée 183 (1975): 3-31. ‘Is it Simple to be a Marxist in Philosophy?’ trans.

Grahame Lock, Essays in Self-Criticism.London: New Left Books, London, 1976.

2éme Congrés. Paris: Maspero, 1977. ‘On the Twenty-Second Congress of the French Communist Party’, trans. Ben Brewster, New Left Review 104

(1977): 3-22.

‘La transformation de la philosophie’ (1976), Sur la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. ‘The Transformation of Philosophy’ trans., Thomas E.

Lewis, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

‘Enfin la crise du marxisme!’In Pouvoir et opposition dans les sociétés post-révolutionnaires. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

‘Solitude de Machiavel’(1977). In Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. ‘Machiavelli’s Solitude’, trans.

Gregory Elliott. Machiavelli and Us. London: Verso, 1999.

‘Marx dans ses limites’(1978). In écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 1. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994.

‘Le Marxisme aujourd’hui’ 1978). In Solitude de Machiavel et autres texts. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998. ‘Marxism Today’, trans. James

H. Kavanaugh, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

‘Le courant souterrain du matérialisme de la rencontre’(1982). In écrits philosophiques et politiques, Tome 1. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994. ‘The Underground

Current of the Materialism of the Encounter’ trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings 1978-1987. London: Verso, 2006..

‘L’avenir dure longtemps’(1985). In L’avenir dure longtemps, suivi de Les Faits. Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992. The Future Lasts Forever, trans. Richard

Veasey. New York: New Press, 1993.

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)

Hailed as ‘the father of modern anthropology’ at the time of his death at age 100 in 2009, Claude Lévi-Strauss was a pivotal figure in the development of

twentieth-century Frenchstructuralism. After pursuing initial studies at the Sorbonne in law and philosophy, Lévi-Strauss took a teaching post at the

University of Sao Paulo in 1935, which also afforded him the experience of ethnographic fieldwork in Brazil. He returned to France in 1939 at the outbreak

of hostilities, but escaped to North America soon after the French capitulation in 1940. While in New York, he became close to the anthropologist Franz

Boas and the linguist Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom would leave an indelible mark on Lévi-Strauss’s intellectual development. Following upon the

success of his memoir and travelogue Tristes Tropiques (1955), Lévi-Strauss returned to the themes first sketched in his Elementary Forms of

Kinship (1949) with an even more rigorous application of Saussurean structural linguistics to the field of anthropology. In Structural Anthropology (1958)

and The Savage Mind (1962), Lévi-Strauss showed how cultural forms could be scientifically studied in terms of universal laws of binary relation and

differentiation. The latter work concluded with a polemical critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s dialectical account of history that, in the eyes of many, signalled

the eclipse of an existentialism of historical praxis by a new structuralism of universal symbolic forms.

Lévi-Strauss was elected to the Collège de France in 1959 and from there exercised a wide influence on French intellectual life throughout the 1960s.

Jacques Lacan expressed his debts to Lévi-Strauss, and Louis Althusser too developed his own ‘structuralist Marxism’ in a manner at once indebted to,

and ultimately critical of the Lévi-Straussian model that was its own condition. Volume five of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse is devoted to the resurgence of

the Rousseauist paradigm in Lévi-Strauss’s project and contains Jacques Derrida’s influential critique of Lévi-Strauss, a piece which that would find wider

dissemination due to its inclusion in Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967). Lévi-Strauss responded to Derrida’s critique in a letter to the Cercle

d’Épistémologie, wherein he noted Derrida’s handling of the logical law of the excluded middle with ‘the delicacy of a bear’. The letter is printed in volume

eight of the Cahiers, devoted to the ‘unthought’ of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Jacques Derrida, ‘Avertissement’, CpA 4.Introduction[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

Jacques Derrida, ‘Nature, Culture, Ecriture (de Lévi-Strauss à Rousseau)’, CpA 4.1[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

Jean Mosconi, ‘Sur la théorie du devenir de l’entendement’, CpA 4.2[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Une lettre à propos de ‘Lévi-Strauss dans le dix-huitième siècle’’, CpA 8.5

[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

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Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: PUF, 1949. The Elementary Forms of Kinship, trans. J.H. Bell, J.R. von Sturmer, and Rodney

Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1955. A World on the Wane, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. London: Hutchinson 1961.

Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic

Books,1963.

La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1962. The Savage Mind, trans. Rodney Needham. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1966.

Mythologiques I-IV:

Le Cru et le cuit. Paris: Plon, 1964, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1969

Du miel aux cendres. Paris: Plon, 1966, From Honey to Ashes, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1973

L’Origine des manières de table. Paris: Plon, 1968, The Origin of Table Manners, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1978

L’Homme nu. Paris: Plon, 1971, The Naked Man, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Myth and Meaning. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.

StructureLa structure

In the first essay in Volume 1 of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Jacques Lacan notes how ‘structuralism’ is beginning to transform the ‘human sciences’. One

of the guiding aims of theCahiers was to analyse the place of subjectivity within the structures uncovered by logic, mathematics, linguistics and the social

sciences.

See also: 

Linguistics , 

Structural Causality , 

Unconscious

In a 1945 article on ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’, the German neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer wrote that ‘Structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it

is, rather, the expression of a general tendency of thought that, in these last decades, has become more and more prominent in almost all fields of

scientific research’.1 Two decades later, the French phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur gave a provocative though apt distillation of ‘structuralist philosophy’

when he described the ‘absolute formalism’ of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology as ‘Kantianism without a transcendental subject’.2 Indeed, stated most

generally, structuralism was a theoretical movement which sought to determine and describe the structures of given phenomena (cultural, natural, or

otherwise) without recourse to agents or entities extrinsic to these phenomena. The perspective of structuralism was immanent, as opposed to

transcendent. In any given system, ‘structures’ were not set in motion or manipulated by external agents; rather, structure ought to be read as the site of

agency itself.

Though Ferdinand de Saussure rarely used the term ‘structure’, it was the posthumous publication of his Cours de linguistique générale in 1916 that laid

the groundwork for the development of twentieth-century structuralism. Breaking with a tradition of comparative linguistics that emphasized the diachronic

development of languages in historical time, Saussure called for a synchronic analysis that took a given language as a unity to be analysed in terms of its

component parts and internal relations. Two distinctions were crucial to Saussure’s approach: that between langue (language) and parole (speech) and

that between the signifiant (signifier) and the signifié (signified).3 The signifier and the signified are the composite elements of the linguistic sign, itself the

basic unit of language. According to Saussure, the diachronic movement of spoken parole is crucially grounded in the synchronic structures of langue.

For this reason, it is the structure of langue that must serve as the site of linguistic analysis rather than the derivative phenomenon of diachronic speech,

orparole.4

Any given langue or language is made up of a set of linguistic units, or signs, that are to be distinguished from their referents in the external world (e.g., in

any given instance, the sign ‘tree’ may be used to refer to the green and brown mass jutting up from the ground in the distance). But the sign is itself split.

The split is between the signifier (i.e., the word, or ‘sound-image’, tree) and what is signified (i.e., the concept tree). It was Saussure’s fundamental

contention that the relation of signifier to signified was essentially arbitrary; there is no natural connection between the sound ‘tree’ and the concept

signified by this particular aural configuration. Rather, the denotative function of signs is a result of the differences between signifiers, on the one hand,

and the differences between signifieds on the other. ‘In language there are only differences [...]. A difference generally implies positive terms between

which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms’.5 The correlation of a given signifier to a certain signified is

a result of the differences of the unique signifier from all others (‘tree’, rather than ‘three’, or ‘tee’, etc.), and the consistent application, within the

synchronic system of language, of this unique signifier to the set of features that distinguish the concept ‘tree’.

At its heart, the Saussurean conception of language is anti-representationalist. Language is no longer conceived as a system of signs which correlates

with some anterior reality independent of these signs. Rather, language itself is now understood as a structure which produces rather

than reveals meaning.

It was this element of Saussure’s thinking that would be most profoundly developed in the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In a series of

groundbreaking works, Lévi-Strauss expanded the narrowly linguistic conception of structure as the site of meaning in language in order to develop a

structural account of the production of meaning tout court. Two related themes were especially central to Lévi-Strauss’s research: the relation between

‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and the universality of myth. For Lévi-Strauss, the universal manifestation of the incest prohibition in various human cultures was

the perfect example of how an essentially ‘cultural’ phenomenon could acquire a ‘natural’ force. The ‘natural’ weight of the incest prohibition was itself tied

up in a network of signs which determined familial relations in the first place, a cultural network that was prior to any biological grasp of kinship relations in

the modern, scientific sense. Lévi-Strauss read the ‘structure’ of kinship relations in the circulation of women as units uniting and dispersing families. To

be sure, a ‘woman’ is much more than a signifier. But the signal insight of Lévi-Strauss’s thinking was to show how chains of signification determine much

that is deemed ‘natural’ in the world, including human freedom itself.

The quest for deep structures subtending the apparent arbitrariness of cultures and existence was a guiding concern of Lévi-Strauss’s research into myth.

In his book The Raw and the Cooked (1964), he sought to ‘draw up an inventory of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of

order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty.’6 In a widely read critique of Sartre’s Critique

of Dialectical Reason (1960), Lévi-Strauss argued that truth was not a function of the historically-mediated subject but depended on a reconstruction of

the effectively atemporal and unconscious ordering or classifying processes that regulate knowledge and experience.7 This emphasis on structure, as a

site of logical or quasi-logical necessity anterior to apparent historical or subjective contingency, was a common theme in post-war French structuralism.

To rethink a concept of subjectivity that might be consistent with a concept of structure as that which is at once determinant and ‘rule-bound’, or governed

by necessity, became a fundamental aim of the editors of the Cahiers. In this task, the two French structuralists of the utmost importance were also the

most proximate influences on the project: Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser.

From ‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage’ (the ‘Rome discourse’, 1953), and Seminar II (1954-55) onwards, Lacan incorporated Saussure’s

account of language and symbolic structure into his novel account of the Freudian unconscious. Lacan’s controversial thesis that ‘the unconscious is

structured like a language’ was consistent with structuralism as a theoretical movement in that it presented the site of signification as not only anterior to

its manipulation by a conscious ego, but determinant of the experiences of consciousness in the first place. Moreover, the crucial element of Saussurean

linguistics - difference - was transposed into Lacan’s own framework. It is the errant differentiation of the signifier itself that is constitutive of the

unconscious for Lacan. It is not through reference to experiences independent of signification that unconscious life is determined for Lacan; rather, it is

the mechanisms of signification itself that determines the ‘content’ of the unconscious. For example, Lacan explains Freud’s concepts of ‘condensation’

and ‘displacement’ in terms of metaphor and metonymy in language. The term ‘structure’ was polyvalent in Lacan’s own work. Though he often referred

to structuring processes (e.g., ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’), he also continued to refer to psychopathologies as having their own unique

‘structures’ (for instance the ‘structures’ of neurosis and psychosis). By the time of his seminars of the 1960s, the relation between structure and

the subject had become Lacan’s primary preoccupation. Lacan’s suggestion that there could be a ‘subject’ of the unconscious would provide an essential

point of departure for several of the thinkers represented in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, who sought to test the compatibility of Lacan’s ideas about

subjectivity with his structuralist tendencies

Althusser conceived of structure in multiple ways as well. In the first place, society ought to be conceived as a ‘structured totality’, composed of economic,

social and ideological levels. The task of theory is to articulate the structures that pre-exist our individual existence, such as the pre-structured hierarchy

of relations of production and reproduction at the level of the economy. By the mid-sixties, Althusser had become preoccupied with problems about the

kind of causal determination appropriate to structures. In his essay ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’ (1962), Althusser opposes adequate to

simplistic conceptions of social determination: whereas a simple or ‘expressive’ approach (as with Hegel or reductionist forms of Marxism) understands

the various components of a society - its economy, political system, legal system, cultural forms, etc. - by referring them back to a single underlying

cause, a structuralist approach appreciates the ‘relative autonomy’ of each of these components, in the absence of unilaterally determinant ‘centre’. Such

an approach is better suited, Althusser argues, to understand the concrete complexity of moments of social crisis, and thus grasp opportunities for

revolutionary political change. In his contribution to Reading Capital (1965) Althusser sought to clarify the sort of ‘structural causality’ at work in the

‘determination of either an element or a structure by a structure’:

In other words, how is it possible to define the concept of a structural causality? [...]. This simple question was so new and unforeseen that it contained

enough to smash all the classical theories of causality -- or enough to ensure that it would be unrecognized, that it would pass unperceived and be buried

even before it was born. [...]. The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations

and which is effective on them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’

on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority

of the structure, as a structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or

space in which the structure arrives to imprint its mark: on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its

effects in the Spinozist sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a

specific combination of its peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects8

But if the whole is already structured and all action is caught up in its mechanisms, how is it possible to present the structure as such? If there is nothing

‘external’ to the structure determining it, how does one occupy an ‘external’ position in order to assess it (and potentially determine it in different ways)? In

other words, the fundamentally recursive nature of structuralism had become a theoretical problem for Althusser insofar as he hoped that structuralist

thinking might prove to be an innovative path for a Marxist political practice. As Alain Badiou put it in his review of Althusser’s major works from the

1960s, ‘Le (Re)commencement du matérialisme dialectique’, ‘the fundamental problem of all structuralism [remains] the problem of structural

causality’.9 Various solutions, sketched below, are presented to this problem over the course of the Cahiers.

The term ‘structure’ is already semantically overdetermined by the time of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Nevertheless, the line of questioning taken in

the Cahiers is distinctive, and focuses on the internal limits of structuralism as a theory and method, on the foundations of structuralism as a science, and,

most particularly, on the relation of subjectivity to structure.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

In Jacques Lacan’s ‘La science et la vérité’, the first article published in the Cahiers, several meanings of the term ‘structure’ are already in play from the

first sentence. Lacan asserts that he ‘established the status of the subject’ in Seminar XII by developing ‘a structure that accounts for the state of splitting

[refente] or Spaltung’ (CpA 1.1:7; E, 855). One of the problems with analysing the term ‘structure’ in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse is that in some articles,

subjectivity is opposed to structure, while in others, there is a structure ofsubjectivity.

The key passage on structuralism in the piece occurs in the context of a discussion of the limits of formalisation. Lacan suggests that Gödel’s

incompleteness theorem shows the ‘failure of logic to suture the subject of science’. Subjectivity remains an ‘antinomic correlate’ to logic, and science is

said to be caught in a ‘deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject’ (CpA 1.1:12-13; E 861). He suggests that this ‘is the mark of structuralism that one

should not miss [on sais[it] là la marque à ne pas manquer de structuralisme]: how structuralism “ushers in to every “human science” it conquers a very

particular mode of the subject”, which Lacan says he is only able to characterise by appealing to topology (in particular, the Moebius strip). This particular

mode of the subject involves the “internal exclusion” of subjectivity from its object’. Lacan contends that structural anthropology only manages to discover

the pure ‘structures’ underlying the social forms of primitive society on condition that it develops combinatorial analysis and the mathematics of the

signifier. The closer the observer of traditional societies ‘is to reducing his presence to that of the subject of science, the more correctly is the collection [of

information] carried out’. Structuralism on Lévi-Strauss’s model covers over this process. Therefore structuralism is by no means advancing towards a

‘nonsaturated’ conception of a ‘calculable subject’, but rather to an encounter with its conditions in the subject of science. The specific structure with

which Lacan’s psychoanalysis will concern itself is the ‘division of the subject’ and emergence of the objet petit a. Lacan will suggest that the subject of

science carries out its own kind of negation: rather than repressing subjectivity, it forecloses it. In his other article in the Cahiers, ‘Réponses à des

étudiants en philosophie sur l’objet de la psychanalyse’ (CpA 3.1). Lacan reiterates the primacy of the analysis of the relation of structure to subjectivity:

‘Psychoanalysis as a science will be structuralist, to the point of recognizing in science a refusal of the subject’ (CpA 3.1:13; trans. 113).

Jacques-Alain Miller’s 1964 paper ‘Action de la structure’ was a direct attempt to deal with the relation between subjectivity and structure, but its

publication was delayed to Volume 9 (devoted to the ‘genealogy of the sciences’). Miller’s ‘Suture: Éléments de la logique du signifiant’ appeared in

volume 1; the chronological order of publication will be followed here. In ‘Suture’ Miller argues that at its most fundamental level the ‘relation of the subject

to the chain of discourse’ involves a ‘suture’, which only permits the subject to figure in discourse as ‘the element that is lacking (in the form of a

“placeholder” [tenant-lieu]’ (CpA 1.3: 39; trans. 26). If the subject is lacking from the chain of discourse, however, it is not purely and simply ‘absent’, and

plays a dynamic role. Miller’s exposition is focused on articulating ‘the general relation of lack to the structure of which it is an element’. Basing himself on

an analysis of Frege’s procedures in his construction of the series of whole natural numbers in The Foundations of Arithmetic, Miller identifies an implicit

appeal tometaphor and metonymy in the construction of the relation between the zero and the one. Within the ‘generative repetition [répétition génitrice]

of the series of numbers’, (46/ 31) Miller discerns ‘the structure of repetition, as process of the differentiation of the identical’ (46/31). The relation of the

subject to structure is revealed in the ‘flickering in eclipses’ of the symptom, whether this is found in theory or practice. From the perspective of the logic

of the signifier, the signifying chain is ‘the structure of structure’ (49/ 34). Miller concludes his piece with a reference to the issue of structural causality, to

which he will return in ‘Action de la structure’. ‘If structural causality (causality in the structure in so far as the subject is implicated in it) is not an empty

expression, it is from the minimal logic which I have developed here that it will find its status’ (49/34).

Serge Leclaire does not discuss structuralism directly in the Cahiers, but he uses the term ‘structure’ in various different contexts. In the first instalment of

‘Compter avec la psychanalyse’, he discusses the ‘structure and function’ of fantasy (CpA 1.5:62), the formation of which he attributes to the process of

fixation of signifiers on the erogenous body. In his encounter with Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner in CpA 3, he will go on to question the

absence of conceptions of the body, desire and drive from their more formalist accounts of the subject’s relation to signification and structure (CpA

3.6:95)

Thomas Herbert’s [Michel Pêcheux] articles (CpA 2.6 and 9.5) also put the term ‘structure’ to different uses. Given the Althusserian foundations of the first

article, ‘Réflexions sur la situation théorique des sciences sociales’, the idea that society must be approached as ‘structured totality’ is central from the

beginning for Pêcheux. But he also talks about the ‘conflictual structure’ (CpA 2.6:149) of society, referring to the dynamic relation between the forces and

relations of production in Marx. Herbert/Pêcheux’s exploration, in CpA 9.5, of the relation between syntax and semantics in the production of ideology

attempts to integrate structural linguistics with Marxist theory, an exercise he continues in his major workLes Vérités de la Palice [Language, Semantics

and Ideology] (1975).

In volume 3, two major articles by André Green and Luce Irigaray elaborate the place of structuralism within the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Responding in part to Lacan’s suggestions in ‘La science et la vérité’, Green claims that an analysis of the role of the objet petit a is essential in order to

‘mark out the limitations of the modern structuralist dimension of Lacanian thought, and no doubt of all psychoanalytic thought)’ (CpA 3.2:16; trans. 164).

Like Miller and Irigaray, he will attempt to provide a detailed account of the ‘structuration’ (19; trans. 167) of the child in its relation to its parents and the

wider symbolic order. He takes up Miller’s concept of suture, but argues that Miller’s structural account should be grounded in the symbolic castration of

the child: ‘The series of castrations postulated by Freud - weaning [sevrage], sphincter control [dressage sphinctérien], castrationproperly speaking’ are at

the basis of the ‘structuring and signifying repetition’ addressed by Miller (19; 167 translation modified). In tandem with Leclaire, Green claims that

psychoanalysis must connect its structuralist account of language with a theory of the body. Recognising that ‘any direct reference to the signified would

destroy the structuralist enterprise’, Green argues (1) that psychoanalysis must nevertheless incorporate reference to physical structures: ‘our confidence

in the stability of pertinent phonological traits ultimately depends on the functioning of the vocal apparatus’ (25; 175) and (2) that a purely structural

linguistic approach is inadequate for psychoanalytic practice, insofar as it involves ‘listening to meaning’ (ibid).

In ‘Communication linguistique et spéculaire’, Irigaray also sets out from the Lacanian psychoanalytic conception that what distinguishes humans from

animals is their status as symbol-using beings, which presupposes their capacity as individuals to negotiate a series of social and linguistic structures.

(CpA 3.3:39; trans. 9). In a detailed analysis, she shows how the formation of the subject takes place through its incorporation into linguistic structures.

Taking up Miller’s account of the suture of the subject to structure, she remarks upon the analogy ‘between the status of the on and [that of] the zero in

the functioning of the structure of [linguistic] exchange. To grasp this operation is to understand that the unconscious is capable of being founded as

structure and not as content’ (CpA 3.3:41; 11; trans. modified). She argues that ‘all structure presupposes an exclusion, an empty set, its negation, as the

very condition of its functioning’. (46; 15, trans. modified), and the subject is ‘a blank, a void, the space left by an exclusion, the negation that allows a

structure to exist as such’ (41; trans. 10).

In ‘Le point du signifiant’, Jean-Claude Milner opts to speak of the relation between subject and signifier in the signifying chain as a ‘formal system’, rather

than a structure (CpA 3.5:78). Plato’s Sophist contains the rudiments of the logic of the signifier, but Plato himself is guilty of ‘ignoring the structure

of zero’ (CpA 82) that underlies his formulations.

In the second instalment of ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse’, Leclaire turns to Freud for an account of how it is the sexual drives that put in place ‘the

radical structure in which the subject is not placed, characterised by the lack of a lost object’ (CpA 3.6:88). Maintaining the primacy of the drives, he

nevertheless gives two ‘structural models’ for the emergence of the subject into the symbolic order: the ‘genealogical tree’ and the ‘open cycle’ (93). In the

debate between Leclaire, Miller and Milner in the question period, the ‘nature of the constraint’ that marks subjectivity is discussed, with Milner claiming

that ‘the nature of the constraint can only be formal’ (95), while Leclaire insists on the primacy of the differentiation of the drives in the formation of the

subject. In the final instalment of ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse’, Leclaire attempts a ‘structural’ approach to the problem of repression. Taking up

Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a, he argues that ‘the structure of the unconscious can be described in terms of signifying concatenation: as a chain that

has the effect of engendering a subject that it excludes and an object that falls out of it’ (CpA 8.6:93).

In volume 4, Jacques Derrida’s ‘Nature, Critique, Écriture’ (CpA 4.1) takes further the critical view towards Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism proposed by

Lacan in ‘Science et la vérité’. Lévi-Strauss’s structural analysis of the Nambikwara mirrors Rousseau’s presentation of a state of nature, a nostalgic

description of a ‘crystalline’ and ‘authentic’ society before violence and social hierarchies (CpA 4.1:27), that implicitly repeats a ‘structure of violence’ (19).

Only an original logic of ‘arche-writing’ can prevent structuralism from replicating binary structures (34).

Jean Mosconi’s article ‘Sur la théorie du devenir de l’entendement’ (CpA 4.2) follows up this line of thought by examining the implicit ‘geneses’ that

underpin ostensibly structuralist analyses (60).

In his introduction to volume 5, Jacques-Alain Miller anticipates the account of structuration he will publish in ‘Action of the structure’. The procedure of

‘enunciating’ structure must be grasped in ‘in the time of its action’. Only this approach will allow us to trace ‘that which perpetuates the structuring

operation in what results from it’ (CpA 5.Introduction:3).

In ‘Les Éléments en jeu dans une psychanalyse’ (CpA 5.1), Leclaire takes a closer look at the logic of the signifier proposed by Jacques-Alain Miller and

Jean-Claude Milner in ‘Suture’ (CpA 1.3) and ‘Le Point du signifiant’ (CpA 3.5) respectively. Leclaire notes how ‘absence’ and ‘disappearance’ are the

‘principle of the structure of the signifier’. He draws attention to Miller’s claim that the central paradox of the signifier in Lacanian psychoanalysis is that

‘the trait of the identical represents the non-identical, from which can be deduced the impossibility of its redoubling, and from that impossibility the

structure of repetition as the process of differenciation of the identical’ (CpA 5.1:12). Leclaire suggests that Miller and Milner’s proposals do not explain

how the psychoanalyst can distinguish given signifiers in practice. While any element of discourse may be a signifier, the psychoanalyst must be able to

differentiate between signifiers, to privilege some over others. He warns against ‘the error of making the signifier no more than a letter open to all

meanings,’ and reiterates that ‘a signifier can be named as such only to the extent that the letter that constitutes one of its slopes necessarily refers back

to a movement of the body’ (CpA 14).

In the same volume, Michel Tort’s article takes up the problem of the ‘structuration’ of the drives in psychoanalysis (CpA 5.2:54), but his account of

psychic ‘structure’ is largely confined to description of Freud’s topographical view of the mind (as split between the structures of consciousness and the

unconscious).

In the extracts from Georges Dumézil in CpA 7, the term ‘structure’ is only used once, to isolate a ‘functional structure’ in common between Roman and

Indian mythology (CpA 7.1:38).

In Jean-Claude Milner’s article ‘Grammaire d’Aragon’ (CpA 7.2), the ‘structure’ of Aragon Aragon’s novel Mise à mort is interpreted as a ‘game’ or play

[jeu], governed by an implicit but determinant set of rules which generate a ‘set that can be referred back to a law’. Identifying the multiple roles of the

characters in the game, Milner shows how structural analysis can articulate the ‘incessant overflowing’ (46) of signification and reflexivity that marks the

modern novel.

Jacques Nassif’s article on psychoanalytic notions of fantasy (CpA 7.4) appeals to recent ideas put forward by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand

Pontalis about fantasies as structures with ‘multiple entries’.10 Like Leclaire and Green, as well as Lacan himself, Nassif uses the term ‘structure’ in

several ways. Individual neuroses have ‘structures’ (73), but these structures contain ‘places’ that can be occupied in fantasy. Nassif also echoes Leclaire

and Green in taking the structure of ‘sexual difference’ as bedrock in the determination of psychic structure (87).

Louis Althusser’s essay on the social contract in Volume 8 attempts to identify the ‘structure of the social contract’, in order to yield up the ‘paradoxical

structure’ (CpA 8.1.15) of total alienation that underpins it.

In ‘Droit naturel et simulacre’, Patrick Hochart undertakes a deconstructive analysis of the ‘structure of moral personality’ in classical political philosophy

(CpA 8.3:66-67).

In volume 9, Foucault’s ‘Réponse au Cercle d’épistémologie’ (CpA 9.2) attempts to go beyond a ‘formalising’ approach to the theory of discourse by

developing a theory of ‘discursive formations’. For Foucault, ‘knowledge [savoir] is not science in the successive displacement of its internal structures; it

is the field of its actual history’ (34; trans. 326). In their response to Foucault, the Cercle query as to what distinguishes Foucault’s ‘rules of formation’ from

the rules already found in structuralism (CpA 9.3:42).

In ‘Dialectique d’épistémologies’, François Regnault relates the ‘structure of the One’ in the Hypotheses of Plato’s Parmenides to the ‘structure of the

subject’, by connecting Plato’s Hypotheses to a series of possible sutures and foreclosures of science by epistemology (CpA 9.4:60). He also makes a

critique of ‘combinatory’ or ‘structuralist’ epistemologies that do not nothing but ‘repeat pure multiplicity’. A dialectic of epistemologies is necessary to

mobilise structuralism within epistemology (69).

In ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6), Jacques-Alain Miller identifies Lacan as the theorist who has put the contemporary notion of ‘structure’ to work in the

most decisive manner. Lacanian psychoanalytic structuralism attempts to analyse the relation between structure and subjectivity and take account of the

ineliminable feature of subjectivity in a way that has so far not been achieved by the structuralism based on linguistics. In the first section of the essay,

simply entitled ‘Structure’, Miller says that structure can minimally be defined as ‘that which puts in place an experience for the subject that it includes’

(95). Two functions qualify his concept of structure: structuration, or the action of the structure; and subjectivity, as subjected [assujettie]. The concept of

structuration can be analysed into a structuring structure and a structured structure. The key mediating concept between ‘structure’ and ‘subject’ for Miller

is the ‘element of reflexivity’ (96): if we assume the presence of ‘an element that turns back on reality and perceives it, reflects it and signifies it, an

element capable of redoubling itself on its own account, then a transformation or a general distortion is produced, affecting the whole structural economy

and recomposing it according to new laws. From the moment that the structure involves such an element, (1) its actuality can be said to have the status

of an experience, (2) the virtuality of the structuring process is converted into an absence, (3) this absence is produced in the real order of the structure,

and the action of the structure comes to be supported by a lack’ (95). In the section on ‘Science’, Miller reflects on the possibility of a Doctrine of

Science that would be able to consistently articulate structure and subject in a complex yet consistent way, thus permitting the establishment of a general

theory of discourse.

Antoine Culioli’s article ‘La formalisation en linguistique’ is a discussion of the possibilities for formalisation in structural linguistics. It begins by referring to

Chomsky’s distinction between surface and deep structure in grammar (CpA 9.7:109).11 The formalisation of language involves appeal to mathematical

and algebraic structures capable of articulating the basic syntactic and semantic features of language (111, 113). Culioli suggests that formalised notation

could help resolve the problem of metalanguage, and create ‘combinatories much more complex than those found in the analysis called structural’ which

has so far only exposed ‘impoverished’ structures (115).

In her study of Galileo, Judith Miller shows how his physics requires a ‘metaphysics of relation [métaphysique de la relation]. This metaphysics has

chosen the “structuralist hypothesis” in Hjelmslev’s sense of the term, where the structuralist hypothesis requires us to define magnitudes [grandeurs] by

relations and not vice versa’ (CpA 9.9:146)

In Alain Badiou’s two contributions to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ‘La Subversion infinitésimale’ (CpA 9.8) and ‘Marque et manque: à propos du zéro’

(CpA 10.8), the term ‘structure’ is not analysed as such, but is used at key points of his argument. Developing an account of the conditions for change

within an internally stratified nature of logical propositions and axioms, Badiou suggests how what is excluded from structures ‘can reappear as the

inaugural mark of a real process of production in a different structure’ (CpA 9.8:128). His main focus in these articles is on the history of mathematics, but

he also intends his analysis to be applied within the theory of historical materialism. In ‘Marque et manque’ he takes up this account of the autonomous

stratification of logical form to criticise Jacques-Alain Miller’s account of the relation between subject and structure. Badiou presents the autonomous

production of mathematical and logical structure is the real ‘outside’ of human thought (CpA 10.8:162). Badiou’s approach in these two pieces may be

classed as ‘hyper-structuralist’ in the sense that they abolish all place for a subject in any domain other than ideology.12

Devoted to the theme of ‘Formalisation’, Volume 10 presents analyses of formalisation and its limits from mathematics and analytic philosophy. This is the

only volume of theCahiers without an introduction, but the texts appear to be chosen to respond to the problems of metalanguage and reflexivity within

the theories of structure developed across previous articles. In ‘La proposition particulière chez Aristotle’ (CpA 10.1), Jacques Brunschwig gives an

account of the ‘logical structure’ behind Aristotle’s theory of syllogisms. In 1966, Robert Blanché had published Structures intellectuelles, a work on logic,

and his contribution to the Cahiers is an analysis of the ‘structure’ of the ‘square of opposition’ in logic, presenting a ‘structuration of the table of sixteen

binary connectors’ (CpA 10.7:135). Badiou’s article is the only the only piece to explain how such problems in logic might be related to the fields of history

and discourse.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Rancière. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1965. Reading Capital,

partial trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970.

Althusser, Louis. Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero, 1965. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: Allen Lane, 1969.

---. Lénine et la philosophie. Paris: Maspero, 1969. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1972.

Caws, Peter. Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1988.

Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge, 1975.

Dosse, François. History of Structuralism [1991-1992], trans. Deborah Glassman, 2 vols. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Gandillac, Maurice de, Lucien Goldmann, and Piaget, Jean. Entretiens sur les notions de genèse et de structure. Paris/The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1965.

Harland, Richard. Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. London: Methuen, 1987.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2005.

Lefebvre, Henri. ‘Le Concept de structure chez Marx’. In Sens et usage du terme ‘structure’ dans les sciences humaines, ed. Roger Bastide et al. The

Hague: Mouton & Co, 1962.

---. ‘Réflexions sur le structuralisme et l’histoire’. Cahiers internationales de sociologie 35 (1963).

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949. The Elementary Structures of Kinship,

trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.

---. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Plon, 1958. Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson. New York: Basic Books, 1963.

---. La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon. 1962. The Savage Mind. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966.

---. Le Cru et le cuit. Mythologiques: Introduction à la science de la mythologie, vol. 1. Paris: Plon, 1964. The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and

Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Macksey, Richard and Eugenio Donato. The Structuralist Controversy. Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1972.

Ricoeur, Paul. ‘Structure et herméneutique’. In Le Conflit des interprétations. Paris: Seuil, 1969. The Conflict of Interpretations, trans. Don Ihde.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Cours de linguistique générale [1916], ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Paris: Payot, 1995. Course in General

Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court. 1983.

Wahl, François, et al. Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes

1. Ernst Cassirer, ‘Structuralism in Modern Linguistics’, Word 1 (1945), 120. ↵2. François Dosse, The History of Structuralism I, 237. ↵3. For a succinct overview of structuralism, see Peter Caws’ entry on the subject in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, http://www.historyofideas.org/cgi-local/DHI/dhiana.cgi?id=dv4-42. ↵4. Langue, as distinct from langage refers to a given language or ‘tongue’, e.g. French or English. These two ‘langues’ are examples of a broader human phenomenon of langage or language as such. Parole translates as speech, and serves as the diachronic site of language in practice. ↵5. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 120. ↵6. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, 10. ↵7. Claude Lévi-Strauss, ‘Histoire et dialectique’, La Pensée sauvage, ch. 9. ↵8. Althusser, Reading Capital, 188-190. In his reference to ‘metonymic causality’ in this passage, Althusser footnotes Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la Structure’, which Miller distributed as a paper before publishing it in Volume 9 of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Althusser tried to clarify his definition a couple of years later: ‘“Structural causality” is meant to draw attention to the fact that the classic philosophical category of causality (whether Cartesian linear causality or Leibnizian “expressive” causality) is inadequate for thinking the scientific analyses of Capital, and must be replaced by a new category. To give some sense of this innovation, we can say that, in structural causality, we find something that resembles the problem (often invoked by biologists) of the causality of the “whole upon its parts”, with the difference that the “Marxist” whole is not a biological, organic whole, but a complex structure that itself contains structured levels (the infrastructure, the superstructure). Structural causality designates the very particular causality of a structure upon its elements, or of a structure upon another structure, or of the structure of the whole upon its structural levels. As for “overdetermination”, it designates one particular effect of structural causality - precisely the one I evoked a moment ago in connection with the theory of social classes: the conjunction of different determinations on the same object, and the variations in the dominant element among these determinations within their very conjunction. To go back to the example of social classes: we may say that they are overdetermined, since, in order to grasp their nature, we have to mobilize the structural causality of three “levels” of society, economic, political and ideological - with structural causality operating in the form of a conjunction of these three structural determinations on the same object, and in the variation of the dominant element within this conjunction’ (Althusser, ‘The Historical Task of Marxist Philosophy’, The Humanist Controversy, 200-201). ↵9. Alain Badiou, ‘Le (Re)commencement du matérialisme dialectique’ [review of Louis Althusser, Pour Marx and Althusser et al., Lire le Capital], Critique 240 (May 1967), 457. ↵10. Laplanche and Pontalis, ‘Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality’, 22; article cited in CpA 7.4:73, 76. ↵11. Jean-Claude Milner translated Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1971. ↵12. After 1968 Badiou moved away from the Althusserian approach to subjectivity taken here, and in 1982 published his own Théorie du sujet (trans. 2009). ↵

SubjectLe sujet

Several novel conceptions of subjectivity are proposed in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Essays by Jacques Lacan, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Luce Irigaray,

among others, attempt to refine a psychoanalytic concept of subjectivity compatible with structuralism, while other articles, by Alain Badiou and

Thomas Herbert, for example, take a more critical approach to the concept of subjectivity and tie it to ideology.

See also: 

Desire , 

Drive , 

Ideology , 

Science , 

Structure , 

Suture

In an essay on the work of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault famously distinguished between two traditions in twentieth-century French philosophy:

on the one hand, ‘a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject’, exemplified by the phenomenology and existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on the other hand, a ‘philosophy of knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept’, pursued by Jean Cavaillès,

Gaston Bachelard, Alexandre Koyré and Canguilhem himself.1 Given the importance of the latter lineage of thought for the thinkers of the Cahiers pour

l’Analyse, one might then expect them to be dismissive of the concept of subjectivity tout court. However, Jacques-AlainMiller, Jean-Claude Milner,

François Regnault and Alain Badiou were all profoundly influenced by the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, which sought above all to develop a

new theory of subjectivity. Overall, the work of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse emerges out of an encounter between the ‘philosophy of the concept’ of the

French epistemology tradition, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Althusserian structural Marxism. The question of the subject is central to the Cahiers pour

l’Analyse, and one of the key essays in volume 9, Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6) makes an explicit and detailed attempt to

develop a concept of subjectivity in line with broadly structuralist priorities.

In the first stage of Althusser’s structuralist reformulation of Marxism in the 1960s - the stage that resulted in the books For Marx and Reading Capital -

the ‘subject’ was a generally neglected, if not derided category. Althusser took the subject in the sense of reflective ‘consciousness’, as well as in the

sense of an individual and deliberate will, to be an essentially ideological category. Althusser generally excluded the category of the subject from his

efforts to provide a philosophical grounding for Marx’s science of historical materialism, and a Marxist concept of science more generally. In the mid-

1960s, however, at the very moment the Cahiers were being produced, Althusser made a temporary (and quickly abandoned) attempt to construct a

theory of the subject compatible with structuralism. In a paper he circulated to a small group including Cahiers editors Yves Duroux and Alain Badiou,

‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’, Althusser allotted a place to what he called ‘subjectivity-effects’ in the four discourses of science, ideology, art

and the unconscious.2 However, he soon changed his mind, and in the Cover Letter for the three ‘Notes’ (dated 28 October 1966), he says that

‘everything I have said about the place of the “subject” in every one of the discourses must be revised. The more I work on it, the more I think that the

category of the subject is absolutely fundamental to ideological discourse, that it is one of its central categories’3. He adds that the subject is ‘bound up

with the truth-guarantee in the centred, double mirror structure’. He concludes that it is not possible to ‘talk about a “subject” of the unconscious, even if

Lacan does’, nor of a ‘subject of science’ nor a ‘subject of aesthetic discourse’. Althusser stresses that his line of thought at the end of Note 1 needs to be

‘very seriously modified, both because of the status it implicitly ascribes to the subject of the general theory and also because of the General Theory

which it suggests is determinant.’4 He thus abandons the notion of the subject, positing henceforth that history is a ‘process without a subject’.

As far as Lacan himself is concerned, ‘it is the act of speech which is constitutive’ of the subject, and ‘by being of the subject, we do not mean

its psychological properties, but what is hollowed out in the experience of speech’ (S1, 232, 230). ‘From the Freudian point of view’ defended by Lacan in

his early seminars, ‘man is the subject captured and tortured by language’ (S3, 243). The subject that is thus subject to and represented by a signifier (for

another signifier) is for the same reason ‘barred’, split and evanescent or ‘fading’. ‘The signifier, producing itself in the field of the Other, makes manifest

the subject of its signification. But it functions as a signifier only to reduce the subject in question to being no more than a signifier, to petrify the subject in

the same movement in which it calls the subject to function, to speak, as subject’ (S11, 207-208). This is why analysis demonstrates that subjectification

corresponds, along with an articulation of the repressed or an affirmation of the drive, a fundamental ‘aphanisis, disappearance [...], the fading of the

subject’ (S11, 207-208).

Althusser’s classification of the subject and its relation to ‘truth’ as ‘ideological’ points to a major divergence with Lacan, for whom the relation between

subject and truth is not ideological. Debates in the Cahiers will turn on this divergence. The question of the possibility of a non-ideological concept of

subjectivity is directly related to the question of the scientificity of such a concept. Lacan himself addressed the subject’s relation to

both science and truth in the inaugural essay of the journal.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

In ‘La Science et la vérité’ (CpA 1.1) Lacan gives his first written explanation of the concept of the ‘subject of science’. What did it mean to be a subject in

the infinite universe opened up by Galileo and modern science? Lacan suggests that psychoanalysis existed because subjectivity still existed, as a form

of ‘non-knowledge’, attached to the cause of truth. Science is caught in a ‘deadlocked endeavour to suture the subject’ (CpA 1.1:12-13; E, 861), but

psychoanalysis can enable structuralism to explain the ‘internal exclusion’ of subjectivity from the symbolic order, and the emergence of the objet petit

a as the ‘cause’ of desire.

Lacan’s claims in this essay emerges out of ideas on the subject developed in Seminar XI, published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psychoanalysis. In his establishment of the distinction between the ‘subject of the enunciation’ and the ‘subject of the statement’, Lacan invokes the

apparently paradoxical sentence ‘I am lying’. His distinction renders the expression unproblematic by making the ‘I’ of the (conscious) statement function

as a shifter that refers in discourse to the lying ‘I’ of the (unconscious) enunciation, that is, the ‘I’ that is doing the lying in the first place, thus making the

statement at once possible and true.5 Lacan’s point is that the ‘I’ of the statement obscures the more fundamental, unconscious ‘I’ that determines the

expression in the first place. The same basic structure is in play in Lacan’s thinking about science, namely that science establishes itself as discourse by

ignoring, or repressing this split that makes it possible in the first place. Science wants to ‘exclude’ the unconscious from its discourse, and attempts to do

so by ‘suturing’ the ‘subject of science’, that is, by having this subject qua agent persist in a kind of wilful ignorance - ‘a lack of truth about truth’ - of its

fundamentally split nature.

In his ‘Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie sur l’objet de la psychanalyse’ (CpA 3.1), Lacan responds to a series of questions about subjectivity,

consciousness and self-consciousness. In this text, he reiterates his interpretation of Descartes’ cogito, which he had characterised in ‘La Science et la

vérité’ as ‘punctual and vanishing’ (CpA 1.1:9; E, 858). ‘At a crucial point of the Cartesian askesis [the sceptical withdrawal of the Meditations] [...],

consciousness and the subject coincide. It is holding that privileged moment as exhaustive of the subject which is misleading [...]. It is, on the contrary, at

that moment of coincidence itself, insofar as it is grasped by reflection, that I intend to mark the site through which psychoanalytic experience makes its

entrance. At simply being sustained within time, the subject of the I think reveals what it is: the being of a fall’. In its purest sense, the Cartesian cogito is

the subject of the unconscious, revealed only through parapraxes and symptoms. Lacan says that psychoanalysis affords us ‘daily experience’, through

the encounter with patients’ symptoms, of a ‘rift or split’ within subjectivity that consciousness attempts to repress. Lacan concludes his ‘Réponses’ as

follows: ‘The best anthropology can go no further than making of man the speaking being. I myself speak of a science defined by its object. Now the

subject of the unconscious is a spoken being, and that is the being of man; if psychoanalysis is to be a science, that is not a presentable object. [...] That

is why psychoanalysis as a science will be structuralist, to the point of recognizing in science a refusal of the subject’ (CpA 3.1:12-13/trans. 113). The

‘subject’ refused here is the subject of the unconscious, that is, the ‘subject of enunciation’, obscured or sutured over in discourse.

Yves Duroux’s ‘Psychologie et logique’ (CpA 1.2) and Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘La Suture: Éléments de la logique du signifiant’ (CpA 1.3) suggest that

although Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic (1884) sets out from a critique of empiricist and Kantian idealist theories of subjectivity, his theory

of logic and mathematics contains elements that can nevertheless be put to work in a psychoanalytic theory of unconscious subjectivity. For empiricism

and idealism, the ‘function of the subject’ is to bring about a synthesis, as a ‘support of the operations of abstraction and unification’. Miller claims that

Frege’s genesis of the series of whole natural numbers rests on a primary metaphor, that of the substitution of 1 for 0, which in turn serves as the motor

for a ‘metonymic chain of successional progression’ (CpA 1.3:46). Frege’s theory of number is based on an ‘alternation of a representation and an

exclusion’ that is structurally analogous to ‘the most elementary articulation of the subject’s relation to the signifying chain’ (CpA 1.3:47).

Serge Leclaire is at first resistant to Miller’s ‘logical’ account of the subject. In ‘L’Analyste à sa place’, he argues that it is rather ‘the analyst who is like the

subject of the unconscious, which is to say that he has no place and can have none’ (CpA 1.4:52). But Leclaire’s claim that the analyst has no ‘place’

does not satisfy Miller, who wants to know from what position one can say such a thing. As his response to Leclaire in the 21st session of Lacan’s

Seminar XII makes clear, Miller’s exacting concern with issues of system, reflexivity and metalanguage will not allow him to accept the privilege of the

analyst without argument.6 In the ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse’ sessions and his two written articles for the Cahiers, Leclaire tends to avoid

metatheoretical questions and instead focuses on the original relation between drive and signifier in the constitution of subjectivity. He argues that the

formal account of alternation and vacillation given by Miller must be rooted in the original split opened up by the loss of the maternal object (cf. CpA

2.5:133, CpA 3.6:87).

In Cahiers volume 2, the question of subjectivity is taken up with relation to the social science of psychology. Canguilhem criticises psychology for having

no real object, a situation that has resulted in its invasion and take over by political ideologies and ‘technicism’ (CpA 2.1).

In ‘Réflexions sur la situation théorique des sciences sociales, et, spécialement, de la psychologie sociale’ (CpA 2.6), Thomas Herbert [Michel Pêcheux]

argues that ‘all the philosophies of consciousness and the subject (that is almost to say, all of philosophy, except certain dissidents like Spinoza, Marx,

Nietzsche and Freud)’ have the ‘ideological function’ of repressing both the economic situation of capitalism, and the superegoic ‘command’ that

accompanies it at the ideological level (CpA 2.6:152). The theory of the subject must yield to the methods of psychoanalysis, linguistics and historical

materialism, and give concrete accounts of how to struggle against ideology. What Herbert calls ‘ideological practice’ concerns the ‘transformation of a

given “consciousness” into a new produced “consciousness”, by means of a reflection of consciousness upon itself’ (142). In Herbert’s second essay,

‘Pour une théorie générale des idéologies’, the problem becomes how to identify the genuine mutations occurring in the field of ideology itself (CpA

9.5:92.

Volume 3 returns to psychoanalysis with major contributions from Luce Irigaray, André Green, and Jean-Claude Milner, and a detailed discussion of key

formal issues at the end of the volume.

Green offers a critical engagement with Miller’s logic of the signifier in his exposition of Lacan’s theory of the objet petit a in CpA 3.2. Green argues that

the subject, as theenunciator of the statement, is automatically placed outside the statement it makes, and is for this reason analogous to the

‘absolute’ zero in Miller’s sense. However, ‘for us this concept issues from the encounter with truth, insofar as it not only dissociates truth from its

demonstration [manifestation] (identity with itself), but it also designates there as its place, through the blank or the trace that negates it’ (CpA 3.2:23;

trans. 173, modified). He specifies that ‘it is inadequate to see this concept only as a simple relation of absence. What should be pinpointed [cerné] here

is the relation of lack to truth’.

Irigaray’s ‘Communication linguistique et spéculaire’ (CpA 3.3) gives a structuralist linguistic account of the conditions for the emergence of subjectivity.

She claims that the genesis of the child-subject is initially brought about by his or her parents talking about them (CpA 3.3:40; trans. 10). This creates a

minimal placeholder with which the child can identify. Irigaray charts the vicissitudes of this minimal subject through the acquisition of language and into

the ‘specular’ regime of visual representation, which offers a series of lures and deceptions, but also allows the subject to assume a place beyond

representation.

Xavier Audouard’s essay on Plato’s Sophist (CpA 3.4) expounds the relation between the logical subject (to which predicates are attached in a judgment),

and the unconscious subject posited by Lacan. In searching for definitions, we attach predicates to a subject, but this subject is never fully included in any

of the predicates. Audouard argues the subject only emerges retrospectively, once the process of dichotomy and division has been initiated (CpA 3.4:58)

Plato’s Sophist is also the terrain of Jean-Claude Milner’s ‘Le Point du signifiant’ (CpA 3.5), which argues that ‘non-being’, as clarified by Plato, is ‘the

signifier of the subject’ (78). According to Milner, this non-being appears at every moment the subject prepares to ‘annul’ the whole signifying chain and

start again from zero. If the chain is not annulled, then non-being appears in an alternating, symptomatic guise instead.

In keeping with Lacan’s complex account of the emergence of desire (cf. ‘Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian

Unconscious’), Leclaire claims in CpA 3.6 that desire is the result of a ‘cleavage by exclusion’, that introduces ‘the dimension of subjectivity or of

redoubled alterity’ (CpA 3.6:93). In desire, rather than a synthetic subject encountering an objective given, a split subject confronts an objet petit a. The

psychoanalytical account of the split subject is taken up further in volume 5 in the essays by Serge Leclaire (CpA 5.1) and Michel Tort (CpA 5.2).

In volume 6, Martial Gueroult develops Fichte’s critique of Rousseau’s account of ‘moral conscience’. On the basis of Kant’s ethics, Fichte criticises

Rousseau’s account of conscience as something simultaneously natural and divine, putting in its place a distinction between nature and right (CpA

6.1:17) and establishing the primacy of an auto-legislating concept over inchoate notions of feeling in the subjective determination of right. Jacques

Bouveresse’s ‘L’Achèvement de la révolution copernicienne’ (CpA 6.7) and Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6:103-105) also argue

for the ongoing relevance of Fichte’s theory of subjectivity for epistemology and political theory. Bouveresse claims that Fichte propagates a ‘Copernican

revolution’ in ethics that goes hand in hand with a ‘vigorous denunciation, and attempt at an explanation of, capitalist anarchy’ (CpA 6.7:130

In his essay on Hume’s theory of authority (CpA 6.5), Bernard Pautrat argues that Hume dissolves the link found in Locke between the philosophical

subject and the political subject, and abandons the project of protecting an ‘illusory autonomy’ (CpA 6.5:71). Instead, Hume proposes a ‘psychology of

obedience’ that will ‘lead the political subject to its natural place, that of subjection’ (72). Pautrat suggests that Hume’s shift from a philosophy of the

subject to a political psychology of the ‘system of subjection’ succeeds in transcending the ideology of the period.

In his exchange with the Cercle d’Épistémologie in volume 9, Michel Foucault notes that as a result of the achievements of psychoanalysis, linguistics

and structuralist anthropology, the very idea of a ‘spontaneous synthesising subject’ is in the process of disappearing (CpA 9.2:12; trans. 301). In their

reply to Foucault’s ‘Réponse’, the Cercle criticise Foucault’s impersonal account of discursive events for occluding the dimension of enunciation that is

necessary to distinguish an event from a mere element in a structure (CpA 9.3:43-44).

In ‘Action de la Structure’ (CpA 9.6), Jacques-Alain Miller goes against the Althusserian grain by appealing directly to the notion of subjectivity. He

stipulates that the subject ‘will no longer figure in the form of a regent, but as a subjected subject [sujette]’ (CpA 9.6:98). Although it is required by

representation, this subjectivity is not required to occupy the position of a foundation. Miller’s subject ‘retains none of the attributes of the psychological,

nor the phenomenological subject’. Its ‘conscious being’ is determined by structural mechanisms. ‘The theory of the subject must start from structure,

taking its insertion for granted. It is essential to preserve the order: from structure to subject’. Miller’s derivation of subjectivity from structure depends on

the introduction of an unspecified ‘reflexive element’ into the presupposed structure. At first, the subject that emerges out of this primary structuration is

‘nothing but a support, a subjected subject’. ‘Subjectivity can be defined as reflexive in the imaginary, and non-reflexive in the process of structuration

itself’. The subject misrecognises what motivates it, attempting to compensate for its emptiness. The subject is thus ‘fundamentally deceived: its

miscognition is constitutive’. Alienation is intrinsic to the subject, which only becomes an agent in the imaginary. Nevertheless, through pursuing the goal

of a doctrine of science, the subject may participate in the ‘infinite activity’ of desire (CpA 9.6:104), and manage in part to transcend alienation.

In ‘Marque et manque: à propos du zero’ (CpA 10.8), Alain Badiou criticises Miller’s entire project to save a conception of the subject by appealing to a

logic of the signifier. Badiou notes that for Lacan and by extension for Miller, ‘the articulation of the subject is conceived through a system of concepts

called the “logic of the Signifier”: Lack, Place, Placeholder, Suture, Foreclosure, Splitting’. A placeholder of lack, the Lacanian subject is an instance of

non-identity and non-self-coincidence. Badiou claims that science and in particular the mathematical writing fundamental to science excludes all lack and

all non-self-coincidence, and he thereby denies that there is any subject of science in the Lacanian sense; science should rather be understood as the

‘psychosis of no subject’ (CpA 10.8:161-62).

Badiou’s first major book of philosophy, Theory of the Subject (1982), is in large part a vigorous critique of the limitations of the merely ‘structural’

conception of things developed in the Cahiers. It affirms the primacy of a revolutionary, post-Maoist subject as the driving force of political change. In

developing a theory of that active if not voluntarist subject which is precisely excluded from the Cahiers project, Badiou here distinguishes the (a)

‘historical’ aspect of the dialectic (which involves destruction of an old order and the deliberate, ‘consistent’ recomposition of a new configuration) from (b)

its ‘structur5al’ aspect (which follows, with Mallarmé and then Lacan, the trajectory of a ‘vanishing cause’), and privileges the former over the latter.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis. ‘Trois Notes sur la théorie des discours’, Écrits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: IMEC, 1995. ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’,

in The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967), ed. François Matheron, trans. G. M. Goshgarian. London: Verso, 2003.

Badiou, Alain. Théorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil, 1982. Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009.

---. ‘Le Sujet et l’infini’, in Conditions. Paris: Seuil, 1992. ‘The Subject and Infinity’ in Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008.

---. ‘Y a-t-il une théorie du sujet chez Georges Canguilhem?’, in Étienne Balibar et al., Georges Canguilhem: Philosophe et historien des sciences, Actes

du Colloque (6-7-8 décembre 1990). Paris: Albin Michel, 1993. 295-304. ‘Is There a Theory of the Subject in Georges Canguilhem?’, trans. Graham

Burchell. Economy and Society 27:2 (1998).

Etienne Balibar, Barbara Cassin, and Alain de Libera. ‘Sujet’. In Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles. ‘Subject’, trans.

David Macey. Radical Philosophy 138 (July/August 2006): 15-41.

Foucault, Michel. ‘La Vie: expérience et science’. Revue de métaphysique et de morale 90:1 (1985). ‘Life: Experience and Science’, trans. Robert Hurley.

In Foucault: The Essential Works, vol. 1: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion. London: Penguin, 1998.

Frege, Gottlob. The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1980.

Lacan, Jacques. Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Jacques-Alain Miller, ed. Alan Sheridan, trans. London: Penguin,

1977.

---. Seminar XII. Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1965-66), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript.

Miller, Jacques-Alain. Contribution to Lacan’s Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 21st session.

Wahl, François. ‘Le structuralisme en philosophie’, in Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes

1. Foucault, ‘Life: Experience and Science’, 466. ↵2. Althusser, ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’, 48. ↵3. Ibid, 37-38. ↵4. Ibid., 38. ↵5. Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 138-42 ↵6. See Miller’s response in Lacan, Seminar XII, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis, 21st session (2 June 1965), 4. ↵

Metaphor/MetonymyLa métaphore/la métonymie

The related functions of metaphor and metonymy were central to Lacan’s rethinking of psychoanalysis in terms of structural linguistics. These concepts

were a crucial resource for the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, especially in their investigations into structural causality and the concept of ideology.

See also: 

Desire , 

Ideology , 

Linguistics , 

Imaginary/Symbolic/Real , 

Signifier , 

Structural Causality

Though metaphor has been a longstanding trope of philosophical thought dating back to Aristotle’s Poetics, the specific distinction between metaphor and

metonymy put to use in the Lacanian enterprise was developed by the linguist Roman Jakobson in a 1956 article titled ‘Two Aspects of Language and

Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’. There Jakobson argued that language is comprised of two axes, a metaphorical axis and a metonymic axis. The

metaphoric axis was the site of substitution, the domain wherein linguistic terms may be substituted for one another in the production of meaning. By

contrast, the metonymic axis was the site of sequential ordering, that is, the domain in which signifiers concatenate to form syntactically ordered

sentences or expressions. Thus, Jakobson’s distinction was consistent with Ferdinand de Saussure’s rethinking of language as split between

paradigmatic relations, which, qua sites of linguistic meaning, hold in absentia, and syntagmatic relations, which eo ipso hold in only in presentia.

The metaphor/metonymy distinction correlates to many other conceptual binaries that were important for Lacan and for the more specific project of

the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, which was equally inspired by the tradition of French epistemology. As the site of meaning, metaphor concerned the relation

of signifier to signified, that is, the process whereby the signifier comes to produce meaning in a given context. (Here some of the original, etymological

sense of the Latin metaphora or Greek metaphorá is retained, as respectively the ‘carrying over’ or ‘transference’ of meaning, with the latter term having

an especially pointed resonance in the psychoanalytic context). Likewise, metonymy, as the domain of sequential ordering, concerns solely the chain of

signification, that is, the sequence of signifiers irrespective of the metaphorical function that generates meaning. Lacan’s appropriation of Jakobson’s

distinction, combined with his engagement with Saussurean linguistics, was one of the major innovations of his thought. But it was also by and large

consistent with a distinction developed in Jean Cavaillès’s essay Sur la logique et la théorie de la science (1946), a key text for the Cahiers. Through a

critical analysis of logical positivism, Cavaillès developed a conceptual distinction between two logical sequences, ‘thematisation’ and ‘paradigmatisation’,

wherein the former has a reflexive structure that generates meaning (like metaphor) and the latter describes the ‘actualising’ or ‘longitudinal’ process that

serves as thematisation’s base but remains abstract without the reflexive movement of the ‘thematic’.1

While Cavaillès was a crucial resource for the engagement with logic in the Cahiers, it remains the case that Lacan was the primary influence. The

metaphor/metonymy distinction receives its most sustained elaboration in one of Lacan’s most famous écrits, ‘The Instance of the Letter in the

Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud’ (1957). Here Lacan makes use of the more generic sense of metonymy as meaning ’the part taken for the whole’

to describe the signifying function of language in toto. The signifying chain that is language itself is essentially metonymic in that it is comprised of a

sequence of letters or signifiers that ‘stands in’ for its putative reference. Lacan writes: ‘I shall designate as metonymy the first aspect of the actual field

the signifier constitutes, so that meaning may assume a place there’ (E, 506). The ‘assumption’ of meaning is named metaphor:

Metaphor’s creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualized signifiers. It flashes between two

signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other’s place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its

(metonymic) relation to the rest of the chain.

One word for another: this is the formula for metaphor... (E, 507).

What is more, ‘we see that metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning’ (E, 508). For Lacan, then, metaphor is

essentially a process ofcondensation, the production of meaning in a discrete instance, whereas metonymy is essentially one of displacement, the

process whereby meaning is always deferred or displaced within a signifying chain. In this regard, ‘the symptom is a metaphor’, as a locus of condensed

meaning, and ‘desire is a metonymy’ (E, 528) as the procedural operation that displaces or defers symptoms and their ‘meaning’. Lacan ties his new

frame to the Freudian edifice most pointedly in his rethinking of the Oedipus complex as the site wherein the ‘paternal metaphor’ - the phallus, functioning

as the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and inducting the child into the symbolic order - converts the originary desire for the mother into the metonymic chain of

desire in language, itself a displacement without end constitutive of the subject of the unconscious.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

The Lacanian conception of metaphor and metonymy is integral to Jacques-Alain Miller’s reading of Frege. in ‘La Suture: Éléments d’une logique du

signifiant’ (CpA 1.3). There Miller mobilizes the sense of metaphor as a ‘vertical’ condensation that establishment the displacement of the signifying chain

in his assessment of the genesis of the whole number line out of the zero in Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Miller argues that the ‘verticality’ of the

movement from zero, by which ‘the 0 lack comes to be represented as 1 [...], indicates a crossing, a transgression’; the successor operation installs a

‘horizontal’ sequence of numbers on the basis of this primary ‘verticality’ (CpA 46-47, trans. 31). Whereas ‘logical representation’ tends to collapse this

construction, the Lacanian concepts of metaphor and metonymy are capable of articulating this construction within a logic of the signifier. The primary

‘metaphor’ of the substitution of 1 for 0 is the motor for ‘the metonymic chain of successional progression’. Miller contends that that we thus arrive at ‘the

structure of repetition, as the process of the differentiation of the identical’ (46/32). He concludes:

If the series of numbers, metonymy of the zero, begins with its metaphor, if the 0 member of the series as number is only the standing-in-place suturing

the absence (of the absolute zero) which moves beneath the chain according to the alternation of a representation and an exclusion - then what is there

to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subject’s relation to the

signifying chain? (47/32)

The suture that simultaneously establishes and annuls the subject is legible in Frege’s discourse only through the conceptual frame of the

metaphor/metonymy relation developed by Lacan.

In her development of the logic of specularisation in Lacan’s and Miller’s arguments in volume three, Luce Irigaray points to the predominant role of

metaphor over metonymy in psychosis, as well as their inverse relation in neurosis. The psychotic ’comes face to face with the metaphoric layering of life

and death rather than living their metonymic succession, which alone is bearable’ (CpA 3.3:50, trans. 19). Hence the anxiety of the psychotic occurs at a

different level to the anxiety of the neurotic, who is unable to ‘metaphorise’ since he is bound to a signifying chain in which he feels constitutively

inadequate, carried forth in an endless metonymic sequence. ‘Riveted to what he has been’ the obsessional neurotic is unable to become.

In his reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine in volume seven, Jean Reboul emphasises the metonymic nature of desire in Sarrasine’s regard for Zimbanella and

its ultimate condensation in a metaphoric bond occurring in the imaginary. ‘Out of a partial and metonymic desire of the object, he bonds with the specular

image of a structured being, and projected into this other little imaginary, he constitutes himself at the same instant that the other finally appears to him as

constituted’ (CpA 7.5:94).

Thomas Herbert’s ‘Remarques pour une théorie générale des idéologies’ CpA 9.5) in volume nine is the most ambitious attempt to take the

metaphor/metonymy relation out of the strictly psychoanalytic framework into a more general theory of ideology. Herbert (the pseudonym for Michel

Pêcheux) relies heavily on the theories of Althusser and Nicos Poulantzas to distinguish between empiricist ideologies that seek to correlate signifiers to

‘actual’ objects and the more tenacious ‘speculative’ ideologies that determine a field of meaning as such regardless of correlation to a putatively external

reality. Taking inspiration from the relationship between (semantic) metaphor and (syntactical) metonymy in Lacanian thought, Herbert shows how

metonymic relations in one domain, e.g., the economic, become metaphorically displaced into, and as a consequence establish relations with, other

domains, such as the political or the ideological (CpA 9.5:85-87). For example, in capitalism, economic relations are effectively metonymical, its

constitutive ‘terms’ - salary, worker, contract, boss, etc. - only making sense in their differential relationship to one another. Through the very organization

of the economic field of production, however, these metonymic sequences become condensed into ‘semantèmes’, units of meaning; each term is

effectively shorthand for the whole sequence. This very compression metaphorically displaces these meanings into the adjacent field of the political,

wherein they constitute a ‘politico-juridical axiomatic’ whose own internal coherence blinds it to its origin).

Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6), also in volume nine, is one of the programmatic texts of the Cahiers enterprise. Drafted in 1964,

this text sketches the lineaments of a theory of structural causality conceived as metonymic causality. Putting forth a position more fully developed in

Herbert’s preceding article, Althusser himself cites Miller’s formulation in his own contribution to Reading Capital as follows: ‘The absence of the cause in

the structure’s “metonymic causality” on its effects is not the fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to its economic phenomena; on the

contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a structure, in its effects’2188). For Miller, again metonymy is a sequence of displacement

that is inaugurated through the metaphorisation of the cause qua lack that determines a given a discourse or sequence. He writes:

‘We will therefore need to explore the space of the displacement of the determination. At once univocal, repressed and interior, withdrawn and declared,

onlymetonymic causality might qualify it. The cause is metaphorised in a discourse, and in general in any structure for the necessary condition of the

functioning of structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the cause. Fundamental law of the action of the structure (CpA 9.6:102). ’

In the preamble that introduces the ‘Chemistry Dossier’ that concludes this volume of the Cahiers, the editors suggest the limitations of a metaphorical

approach to science (CpA 9.11:168). This metaphorical or analogical approach results whenever one specific science serves as the basis for a general

discourse on science. What is advocated here, by contrast, is a grasp [reprise] of science ‘as a whole’ which betokens a focus solely on relations, and

hence, by implication, the metonymic sequences of science’s conceptual development over the metaphoric substitution at its source.

Select bibliography

Althusser, Louis, et. al. Lire le Capital. Paris: Maspero, 1968. Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970.

Aristotle. Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.

Jakobson, Roman. ‘Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances’ (1956). In Selected Writings, vol. II, Word and Language. The

Hague: Mouton, 1971.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Notes

1. Cavaillès’s use of paradigm here is different from Saussure’s, in that Cavaillès uses the concept to describe the actuality of syntax, whereas for Saussure it is the site of the established meaning. Cavaillès deliberately more historical approach is grounded in the semantics of Alfred Tarski. ↵2. Reading Capital, ↵

IdeologyL’idéologie

Equally inspired by Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse witnessed an effort to produce a formalised account of ideology in

accordance with the tenets ofpsychoanalysis and Marxism. The relation of ideology to science would be a fundamental site of discord within

the Cahiers themselves.

See also: 

Epistemological Break , 

Science

Though in its most conventional usage the term ‘ideology’ refers to something like ‘worldview’ or ‘outlook’, and in contemporary political discourse it is

often used to distinguish political party lines, the concept of ‘ideology’ occupies a crucial, and contested, position in the history of Marxist thought. The

term was first coined by Destutt de Tracy in 1796, yoking together the roots -logy and ideo- to denote the ‘science of ideas’. The word first became a mark

of opprobrium when Napoleon castigated the republicanism of the idéologuesopposed to his reforms.1 But it was with Marx’s essay The German

Ideology that the term first set off on its complex trajectory in the Marxist canon itself.2

For Marx, the ‘German ideology’ referred to an excessive investment in the domain of ‘pure thought’, rather than the world of concrete material relations

and conditions, dominant among the ‘Young Hegelians’. Marx articulated his method in opposing terms:

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out

from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated and thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out

from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-

process.3

The idealist philosophy of the Young Hegelians, a group which included Max Stirner, Bruno Bauer, and Ludwig Feuerbach, among others, was, for all

intents and purposes, backwards. ‘Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life [...] Where speculation ends - in real life - there

real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk about consciousness

ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place.’4

In this work, Marx is targeting a specific body of thought, the ‘German ideology’ of post-Hegelian speculative philosophy. But Marx’s critique of the

‘German ideology’ also provides the lineaments of a critique of ideology tout court as a kind of blindness to real, material conditions. With Engels, the

concept will come to be roughly equivalent to ‘false consciousness’, in particular the false consciousness of a working class mystified by the ideas of the

dominant class, the bourgeoisie. In 1923, Georg Lukács published his History and Class Consciousness, a book written remarkably without the benefit

of The German Ideology or other of Marx’s early writings.5 In this seminal text for Western Marxism, the overcoming of alienation is tantamount to an

escape from the self-alienating false consciousness of the positivistic and empirical worldview of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat was the class that would

accomplish this overturning, and its mechanism would be the work of a generalised class consciousness developed and fortified in both theory and

practice. But Lukács recognised, no less than Engels had before, that the proletariat was mystified in bourgeois ideology. Consequently, in a synthesis of

Hegelianism and Leninism, he insisted upon the need for a revolutionary party leadership that has already broken with ‘ideology’ and incarnates the

consciousness of the epoch.

For Lukács, overcoming ideology meant abandoning the positivism and empiricism of the sciences through a dialectical thinking of the social totality. If his

thinking restored something of the dialectical elements of Marx’s thought, certain aspects of Lukács’ project seemed to go against the grain of Marx’s own

writings, e.g., the claim that ‘positive science’ begins when ‘empty talk about consciousness ceases.’

The return to the humanism (and Hegelianism) of the young Marx ushered in by Lukács’ work, along with the collapse of the Stalinist model of Soviet

Communism, provides the essential framework for understanding Louis Althusser’s intervention into Marxist theory and his arguments concerning

ideology more specifically. Polemically positioning himself in opposition to Marxist humanism, Althusser insisted in a series of works in the 1960s that

Marx had indeed founded a science, the science of historical materialism, and that what made this a science was its epistemological break with the

humanist, and Hegelian, ideology of Marx’s youth. Althusser’s relentless affirmation of science in its opposition to ideology would be of crucial importance

to the normaliens behind the Cahiers pour l’Analyse.

Many definitions of ideology can be found throughout Althusser’s oeuvre, but they all share a common theme insofar as ideology ceases to be confused

with anything like ‘false consciousness’ and comes to be tantamount to a category coextensive with the domain of lived experience itself. The most

famous definition of ideology in Althusser’s writings comes from his essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’

(1970), a text which reflects Althusser’s own theoretical investigations undertaken in correspondence with the editors of the Cahiers.6 There ideology is

defined as ‘a “representation” of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’7 In this essay, Althusser refined his position

on ideology as it was expressed in For Marx and Reading Capital, wherein the science/ideology distinction was of primary concern. In ‘Marxism and

Humanism’ (1964), Althusser had asserted that whereas socialism is a scientific concept, humanism is an ideological one. ‘When I say that the concept of

humanism is an ideological concept (not a scientific one), I mean that while it really does designate a set of existing relations, unlike a scientific concept, it

does not provide us with a means of knowing them’; it does not ‘give us their essences.’8 Marx arrived at his ‘scientific theory of history’,

historical materialism, by showing that the framework of the alienation of human essence found in Feuerbach was essentially ideological.

Althusser’s goal in this essay was to make the case for a science that had broken with ideology, and in this it remained crucially reliant upon The German

Ideology. But the lineaments of Althusser’s later position concerning ideology as the domain of practice itself were already clear: ‘An ideology is a system

(with its own logic and rigour) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts, depending on the case) endowed with a historical existence and role

within a given society’.9 As such, ideology is an ‘organic part of every social totality’ and the very idea of a society without ideology is an ideological one.

This being the case, the aim of ‘theoretical practice’ should be to ‘transform ideology into an instrument of deliberate action on history.’10

It is here that Althusser’s break with a notion of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ is its most evident. Ideology, he maintains, is not something that takes

place on the level of consciousness. Rather, it is ‘is profoundly unconscious, even when it presents itself in a reflected form’. ‘Ideology is indeed a system

of representations, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with “consciousness”: they are usually images and occasionally

concepts, but it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their “consciousness”.’11

Althusser’s arguments in this essay reflect his own engagement with Jacques Lacan’s ideas around this time. In 1964, the same year ‘Marxism and

Humanism’ first appeared, Althusser also published ‘Freud and Lacan’ in La Nouvelle Critique. The publication of this text in the official intellectual journal

of the French Communist Party was a deliberate attempt to make the case for psychoanalysis’s pertinence to the Marxist enterprise despite years of

neglect and dismissal by the official party line. Althusser understood his own relation to Marx in a manner similar to Lacan’s relation to Freud; both were

saving the genius of the ‘master’ from ideological mystification through a return to the original’s anti-humanism and scientism. Beyond methodological

similarities, however, Althusser’s use of the term ‘imaginary’ - in both ‘Marxism and Humanism’ and in the later essay on ideological state apparatuses -

must be understood in a Lacanian sense. In his earliest writings, Lacan had introduced a tripartite distinction among the real, the imaginary, and the

symbolic. If the ‘real’ referred to the un-representable materiality of existence itself, and the ‘symbolic’ referred to the domain of signification constituted by

the subject’s entrance into language, the ‘imaginary’ expressed the ‘stage’ wherein the subject first ‘miscognises’ itself as a discrete, embodied subject in

a broader field of relations. This was the thesis of Lacan’s famous lesson on the ‘mirror stage’ (E 93-100), which described the moment wherein the

infant, seeing himself in the mirror for the first time (or another enfant whose movements he mimics) identifies his own ego with the image of himself as a

constituted whole. In this very identification, an inadequacy is established in that, given the infant’s limited motor control, he cannot fully ‘live up’ to the

wholeness of the ‘ego-ideal’ experienced in the specular image of himself. The site of this phenomenon is the domain of the ‘imaginary’ in Lacan’s rubric.

The Lacanian imaginary was a crucial component of Althusser’s theory of ideology. For Lacan, the specular identification constitutive of the imaginary as

a field of representations was a thoroughly unavoidable, and inescapable, element of lived existence. For Althusser, the field of ‘ideology’ was equally

omnipresent and the domain in which all practical relations effectively took place. It was the task of science, for Althusser, and psychoanalysis for Lacan,

to articulate and make known the structure thinking the relation between science and ideology and the practical implications of making this distinction

were arguably the two primary concerns of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

The first direct mention of ‘ideology’ in the Cahiers is in Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘La Suture: Éléments d’un logique du signifiant’ (CpA 1.3). Miller’s goal in

this text is to show how the constitution of whole numbers in Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic is predicated upon a suture which covers over an

inaugural lack. In positing the number zero as the concept for the category ‘that which is not identical to itself’, Frege also establishes the concept of unity,

or One, that will then allow, via the successor function, the proliferation of whole numbers. Miller detects the ideological gesture par excellence in this

attribution of unity, via the concept or ‘name’ of zero, to that which is essentially void, or lack. He writes:

For the unity which is thus assured both for the individual and the set, it only holds in so far as the number functions as its name. Whence originates the

ideology which makes of the subject the producer of fictions, short of recognizing it as the product of its product - an ideology in which logical and

psychological discourse are wedded with political discourse occupying the key position, which can be seen admitted in Ockham, concealed in Locke, and

miscognized thereafter (CpA 1.3:41).

The ‘fiction’ in question here is that of a full self-presence akin to that established in the specular miscognition of Lacan’s mirror stage. Miller invests this

problematic with political weight, seeing it as formally related to the putative self-presence of the autonomous subject in political liberalism (hence the

reference to Locke).

Volume 2 of the Cahiers is titled, ‘Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?’. Although Georges Canguilhem does not use the term ‘ideology’ in the essay that opens

this volume (CpA 2.1), in the following piece Robert Pagès’s addresses the role that ‘ideological implications’ play in Canguilhem’s assessments of the

social and psychological sciences (CpA 2.2:96). The main concern of Canguilhem’s essay is the difficulty that psychology has historically had in

determining its scientific object and its relationship with other modes of social practice and inquiry.

Volume 2 concludes with the first of Thomas Herbert’s two contributions to the Cahiers (Herbert was the pen name for Michel Pêcheux). In this piece,

titled, ‘Réflexions sur la situation théorique des sciences sociales et, spécialement, de la psychologie sociale’ (CpA 2.6), Herbert develops a critique of

social psychology modelled on the epistemologyAlthusser outlined in his essay ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’.12 Herbert describes the ‘theoretical practice’

anterior to an epistemological break as ‘ideological practice’, but also affirms the persistence of ‘ideological contents’ alongside all forms of theoretical

and political practice (CpA 2.6:144-5).

Herbert claims that psychology and social psychology, especially when they have resort to ‘models’ and practical instruments, remain caught in the

ideological schema of the ‘realisation of the real’ (CpA 2.6:155). They remain governed by economic conditions, reflecting the social relations

characteristic of capitalism and the ideology of adaptation (CpA 2.6:157). This ideology, nevertheless, is different in kind to the inessential ideologies of

alchemy or ancient astronomy, for example. Developing Althusser’s account of the three ‘generalities’ involved in the process of theoretical practice,

Herbert suggests that the ideology of the social sciences can be taken precisely as the first set of ‘generalities’ upon which theoretical practice sets to

work. Theoretical practice does not aim to ‘realise the real’, but rather to trace the breaks that constitute new sciences, and to show how, once

constituted, the objects of these sciences are capable of methodical reproduction (CpA 2.6:160).Herbert’s later contribution to the Cahiers (CpA 9.5) will

attempt this ‘practice’ in an examination of the emergence and reproduction of ideology itself.

In his ‘Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie sur l’objet de la psychanalyse’ (CpA 3.1) in volume 3, Lacan uses the term ‘ideology’ in a derisive

manner that is nonetheless evocative of its Althusserian usage as he explains the origins of his argument concerning the mirror-stage:

The autonomous ego, the conflict-free sphere proposed as a new Gospel by Mr. Heinz Hartmann to the New York circle is no more than the ideology of a

class of immigrants preoccupied with the prestigious values prevailing in central European society when with the diaspora of the war they had to settle in

a society in which values sediment according to the scale of income tax (CpA 3.1: 8 trans. 108-09).

In his ‘Nature, Culture, Écriture’ in volume 5, Jacques Derrida describes ‘the Saussurian exclusion of writing’ as ‘ideology’ (CpA 4.1:28) and ultimately

goes on to criticize Lévi-Strauss’s ‘political ideology’ as an example of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ (CpA 4.1:41):

Previously the empirical character of the analyses concerning the status of science and the accumulation of knowledge removed all rigor from each of the

propositions advanced and permitted their consideration with an equal pertinence as true or false. It is the pertinence of the question which appeared

doubtful. The same thing happens here again. What is called enslavement can equally legitimately be called liberation. And it is at the moment that this

oscillation is stopped on the signification of enslavement that the discourse is frozen into a determined ideology that we would judge disturbing if such

were our first preoccupation here (CpA 4.1:41; trans. 131).

In the same issue, Jean Jean Mosconi also assesses Lévi-Strauss’s work and its return to an originary model of culture as being against the ‘ideology of

the progress of the human mind [esprit]’ (CpA 4.2:53).

In volume 5, devoted to Freud, Michel Tort concludes that, by taking biology as his model of scientificity, Freud winds up with an ideological concept of

drive (CpA 5.2:65): that ‘Freud should finish up with pure speculation is sufficient to indicate without ambiguity that this “biology” is an ideological myth [...]

A form of scientificity which can only be imported into a domain in a speculative form is ideological for sure.’

Volume 6 concerns ‘La politique des philosophes’ and contains François Regnault’s ‘La pensée du Prince’, an assessment of Machiavelli’s efforts to

produce a science of politics in the ‘ideological terrain that was given to him’ (CpA 6.2:34). Bernard Pautrat.’s introduction of texts by Hume emphasises

the latter’s destruction of the notion of autonomous subjectivity one finds in Locke’s example and develops his alternative univocal conception of the

subject as that which is obedient or subjected to authority (CpA 6.5). Nonetheless, Pautrat remarks, the ‘imaginary subject of illusory autonomy’ persists

and continues to ground ‘psychology as ideology as such’ (CpA 6.5:73). In the final article of this issue, Jacques Bouveresse criticises the romantic and

messianic elements in Fichte’s political thought which, by allowing for the belief in some kind of ‘direct access to the Idea’, make possible ‘all the

aberrations of the ideology of the Leader’ (CpA 6.7:107).

Volume 8 of the Cahiers is devoted exclusively to ‘L’Impensée de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ and opens with Louis Althusser’s famous reading of the

discrepancies [décalages] that constitute Rousseau’s theory of the social contract (CpA 8.1). Althusser concludes that the tensions that inhere in

Rousseau’s theory, and which surround the equivocal nature of the ‘particular’ in its relation to the general will, can only be surmounted through a

permanent ‘flight forward in ideology’ (a ceaseless effort to educate and ‘purify’ the interests and morals of the individuals who make up the social

contract) on the one hand, and on the other, an effort to regress or turn the clock back in ‘(economic) reality’, by retreating to ‘the old dream of

“independent commerce”, i.e. of petty artisanal production’ (CpA 8.1:39-41). The only means of achieving this latter goal, however, is yet more ‘moral

preaching’. Rousseau’s attempt to propose a practical means of suppressing the existence of social classes or factions thereby falls into a vicious circle:

‘flight forward in ideology, regression in the economy, flight forward in ideology, etc.’ This final discrepancy is thus ‘the Discrepancy of theory with respect

to the real in its effect: a discrepancy between two equally impossible practices. As we are now in reality, and can only turn round and round in it

(ideology-economy-ideology, etc.), there is no further flight possible in reality itself. End of the Discrepancy’ (42).

Althusser concludes his analysis with the suggestion that Rousseau’s ‘fictions’ - e.g., Émile, La Nouvelle Heloise - are the site of this ideological flight

forward. In the next article of this issue, Alain Grosrichard makes a virtue of this ostensibly critical remark of Althusser’s in order to argue that the ‘moral

preaching’ in Rousseau’s literary output constitutes a necessary ideological counterweight to the analyses found in the Discourses and other political

writings. It is the tension established between these two poles of his thinking that constitutes the ‘Gravité de Rousseau’, the title of Grosrichard’s article

(CpA 8.2).

In volume 9, ‘Généalogie des sciences’, François Regnault’s ‘Dialectique d’épistémologies’ (CpA 9.4), assumes the Althusserian distinction between

science and ideology as a matter of course in its effort to enumerate the possible relations between a science and a theory of science, that is,

an epistemology.

The most extensive engagement with ideology in the whole of the Cahiers is also found in this issue in Thomas Herbert’s second article, titled:

‘Remarques pour une théorie générale des idéologies’ (CpA 9.5). In this article, Herbert pursues an extremely technical analysis that complements his

earlier invocation of Althusser’s arguments from ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ with a more robust engagement with Lacan’s account of metaphor and

metonymy in the chain of signification. The primary concern is how ideological semantèmes, or ‘units of meaning’ become displaced from one level of the

social totality (e.g., the economic) to another (e.g., the political), and how, in turn, this very displacement mechanism creates the possibility of an

‘ideological mutation’ in the transfer:

As the horizontal articulation of ideological elements according to a syntactic structure, the metonymic effect produces a rationalization-automisation at all

structural levels, each of which will now appear endowed with ‘internal coherence.’ In this way the subject’s identification to the political and ideological

structures that constitutesubjectivity as the origin of what the subject says and does (the norms he states and practices) is produced: this subjective

illusion through which, to use aphenomenological expression, the ‘consciousness of being in a situation’ is constituted hides from the agent his own

position in the structure (CpA 9.5:88).

In order to further clarify the metonymy/metaphor relation in the production of ideological subjectivity, Herbert turns to Lévi-Strauss’s distinction between

the law and the rule. In effect, Herbert argues, one will never be able to break from a set of ideological coordinates by focusing on the rules which govern

a network of syntactical relations; much more crucial is the law which institutes these rules in the first place. This distinction allows Herbert to contrast the

implications of his framework from a focus on class consciousness in a Lukácsian vein. Becoming aware of the ‘pre-conscious rules’ which structure a

social totality is insufficient for liberating a subject from his alienation; what is needed is a confrontation with the ‘mechanism of the unconscious Law’

which determines the set of rules in the first place.

This ‘mechanism’ is the object of analysis in Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’, also published in volume 9 of the Cahiers. Again developing

Lacan’s theories on this score, Miller considers ‘ideology’ in terms of an ‘imaginary miscognition’ (CpA 9.6:96). More specifically, Miller claims that

ideology always accompanies scientific discoursebecause the latter is established through the exclusion of lack (a process described a

propos of Frege in CpA 1.3). But since, for Miller, ‘the lack of a lack is also a lack’, ‘the lack of the lack leaves in every scientific discourse the mark of the

miscognition, of the ideology that accompanies it, without being intrinsic to it.’ (CpA 9.6:102). Insofar as science involves a foreclosure, it leaves a space

where ideology can be fostered. Appealing to the idea of an ‘impossible’ and ‘anonymous’ doctrine of science, Miller insists that his own account of the

subjective ‘guarantee’ of science should not itself be confused with ‘ideology’ (CpA 9.6:105).

A critique of Miller’s arguments on this topic constitutes one of the key articles of Cahiers’ tenth and final volume, Alain Badiou’s ‘Marque et manque: À

propos du zero’ (CpA 10.8). Badiou’s position in this article is not a wholesale rejection of Miller’s own. Rather, Badiou’s claim is that the process of

suturation that Miller describes applies perfectly - though solely - to ideology. The subject as such is an ideological category that has no place in science:

‘there is always a subject of ideology, for this is the very mark by which we recognize the latter. Place of lack; splitting of the closed: these are the

concepts on whose basis we can elaborate the law governing the functioning of ideological discourse’. (CpA 10.8:162).

For Badiou, the maintenance of the distinction between science and ideology along Althusserian lines is imperative: ‘to claim that the science/ideology

difference could be effaced through a logic of the oscillating iteration, and to nominate a subject of science, is to preclude the possibility of conjoining,

through their very disjunction, Marx and Freud’ (CpA 10.8:162).

The precise nature of the theoretical relation between Marx and Freud, much like the conceptual relation between science and ideology, would remain

unresolved in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, even as this irresolution would nonetheless provide one of the most fecund avenues for theoretical work carried

out in their wake.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. ‘Sur la Dialectique matérialiste’. La Pensée 110 (August 1963). Reprinted in Pour Marx. Paris: Maspero, 1965. ‘On the Materialist

Dialectic’. For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969.

---. ‘Freud et Lacan’. La Nouvelle Critique 161-2 (December 1964 - January 1965; revised 1969). ‘Freud and Lacan’, trans. Ben Brewster. Lenin and

Philosophy. London: New Left Books, 1971.

---. ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation’. trans. Ben Brewster. Lenin and Philosophy. London: New Left Books,

1971.

---. ‘Trois Notes sur la théorie des discours’. Écrits sur la psychanalyse. Paris: IMEC, 1995. ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’, trans. G.M.

Goshgarian. The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings (1966-1967), ed. François Matheron. London: Verso, 2003.

---. ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ (1967). Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso, 1991.

Goldmann, Lucien. ‘Ideology and writing’, TLS, 28 September 1967.

Hall, Stuart. ‘The Problem of Ideology’. In Marx: A Hundred Years On, ed. Betty Matthews. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1983.

Jameson, Fredric. ‘Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan’, Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977).

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits (1966), trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Lichtheim, George. ‘The Concept of Ideology’. History and Theory. Vol.4, No. 2, 1965.

Lukàcs, Georg. History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: The Merlin Press, 1971.

Pêcheux, Michel and Michel Fichant. Sur l’histoire des sciences. Paris: Maspero, 1969. (Fascicule III in the ‘Cours de Philosophie pour Scientifiques’,

1967-68).

Ranciere, Jacques. ‘On the Theory of Ideology - Althusser’s Politics’. In A Radical Philosophy Reader, eds. Roy Edgley and Richard Osborne. London:

Verso, 1985.

Tucker, Robert C. ed.. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

Notes

1. George Lichtheim, ‘The Concept of Ideology’, 165. ↵2. It should be noted that Marx’s essay was only made public in 1932 when it was published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. Although the term is used in various ways in Capital and other later works, the conceptgarners its most extensive treatment in this essay, famously described by Marx as his and Engels’ attempt to ‘settle accounts with [their] erstwhile philosophical conscience’ and consequently as a document ‘abandoned to the gnawing criticism of the mice’. The full text is available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ ↵3. Marx-Engels Reader, 154. ↵4. Ibid., 155. ↵5. Substantial excerpts of this work are available online at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/index.htm ↵6. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm. See as well Althusser’s ‘Three Notes on the Theory of Discourses’, a document circulated to Badiou and Duroux among others, and in which many of the arguments of this later essay are discernable in embryo. ↵7. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, 162. ↵8. Althusser, For Marx, 223. ↵9. Ibid., 231 ↵10. Ibid., 232. ↵11. Ibid., 233. ↵12. Available online at: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1963/unevenness.htm. ↵

Epistemological BreakLa coupure épistémologique

The concept refers to an event in the history or practice of science involving a radical break or cut (coupure) with previous, ideological conceptions. The

term, inspired by GastonBachelard, was of fundamental importance to Louis Althusser’s reading of Marx and also resonated with the theses of

Alexandre Koyré that informed Jacques Lacan’s considerations of science.

See also: 

Epistemology , 

Ideology , 

Science

The ‘epistemological break’ was a crucial concept in Louis Althusser’s rethinking of Marxism in the 1960s. In the essays collected in his volume, For

Marx (1965), Althusser put forth the thesis that Marx’s theoretical development could be understood in terms of a ‘break’ from the Hegelian and

humanist ideology of his youth that allowed him to articulate thescience of historical materialism, or at least begin to sketch its lineaments, in mature

works such as Capital.1 For Althusser, the break itself was achieved as a result of Marx’s own ‘theoretical practice’, which can be understood as a

conceptual working-over of an ideological ‘problematic’ - in Marx’s case, that of bourgeois political economy - in order to convert it into a scientific one,

i.e., that of historical materialism. (Althusser’s concept of the ‘problematic’ was taken from his friend Jacques Martin; it is conceptually very similar to

Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse, in that it refers to the theoretical framework in which ‘knowledge-production’ takes place).2 In a crucial essay

of For Marx, ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ (1963), Althusser describes the mechanism of ‘theoretical practice’, and attributes the concept of the

‘epistemological break’ to Gaston Bachelard:

The theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological theoretical practice of its prehistory: this distinction takes the form

of a ‘qualitative’ theoretical and historical discontinuity which I shall follow Bachelard in calling an ‘epistemological break’. This is not the place the discuss

the dialectic in action in the advent of this ‘break’: that is, the labour of specific theoretical transformation which installs it in each case, which establishes

a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological.3

It is important to remark that two distinct theses are operative in Althusser’s arguments concerning Marxism and the ‘epistemological break’. On the one

hand, Althusser wants to claim that Marx personally experienced or ‘lived’ something like an ‘epistemological break’, even if this was unbeknownst to

Marx himself. In his introduction to For Marx, Althusser developed a schematic of Marx’s works, categorizing them into ‘Early Works’, ‘Works of the

Break’, ‘Transitional Works’, ‘Mature Works’. (Althusser located the ‘break’ somewhere around 1845, with the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ and The German

Ideology). This was a thesis Althusser had trouble defending over time; ultimately he limited the works of Marx’s full maturity to the Critique of the Gotha

Programme. But it was also inconsequential to his other main argument concerning the ‘epistemological break’, namely, that the theory of dialectical

materialism contained in Marx’s thought itself provides the mechanism by which an ‘epistemological break’, taking one from ideology to science, can be

achieved in multiple instances:

I shall call ‘theory’ (in inverted commas) the determinate theoretical system of a real science (its basic concepts in their more or less contradictory unity at

a given time). [...] I shall call Theory (with a capital T), general theory, that is the Theory of practice in general, itself elaborated on the basis of the Theory

of existing theoretical practices (of the sciences), which transforms into ‘knowledges’ (scientific truths) the ideological product of existing ‘empirical’

practices (the concrete activity of men). This Theory is the materialist dialectic which is none other than dialectical materialism.4

It is this capital T ‘Theory’, christened ‘dialectical materialism’ in Althusser’s work, that we can see most clearly (and perhaps ironically, given the

attribution to Marx) the theory of the ‘epistemological break’ inspired by Bachelard’s example. As Althusser himself admitted, the term ‘epistemological

break [coupure]’ was not to be found in Bachelard’s oeuvre, where one finds instead references to ‘epistemological ruptures [ruptures]’. The discrete

quality of the break, or cut, introduced into the concept by Althusser lessens something of the procedural quality of Bachelard’s concept, even if

Althusser’s own descriptions of ‘theoretical practice’ reintroduce this element into the mix.5 In a series of books written in the 1930s, chief among them La

Formation de l’esprit scientifique, Bachelard described the rupture that establishes scientific thought as the result of a series of encounters with

‘epistemological obstacles’. Scientific thought always involves a break with the obstacle of immediate experience (the ‘empirical’ or ‘concrete’ in

Althusser’s rubric).6 For example, the explanation of fire as oxidation rearranges the spontaneously experienced phenomena of fire itself into a rational

framework that is not immediately, but only scientifically ‘experienced’. Moreover, the scientific break typically involves a rejection of the general ideas or

received wisdom of the time. In this regard, the advent of theory of Relativity brokered an epochal shift in modern science. In La Philosophie du non,

Bachelard was categorical: ‘The scientific mind [esprit] can only be constituted by destroying this non-scientific mind. [...] All real progress in scientific

thought necessitates a conversion. The progress of contemporary scientific thought has determined transformations in the very principles of

knowledge’.7 Bachelard described the ruptural quality of this experience of new scientific knowledge in emphatic terms: ‘Above all, we must be cognizant

of the fact that the new experience says no to the old experience; without that, by any measure, it is not a question of a new experience’.8

We see, then, that the equivocation present in Althusser’s use of the ‘epistemological break’ is already latent in Bachelard’s as well, where the sense of

‘epistemological rupture’ has a world-historical scope (as in the advent of Relativity), but also refers to the discrete experience of beginning to think

scientifically on an individual basis.

The vacillation between the world-historical and the local or specific bearing of the concept is also evident in the influence Alexandre Koyré’s theses

regarding Galileo had on the editors of the Cahiers. Though Koyré himself did not use the expression ‘epistemological break’ or ‘rupture’, a similar logic is

in play in his volume From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. There Galileo inaugurates the modern scientific age via a revolution interior to

scientific thought itself. No longer does mathematics describe a set of fixed and perfect entities; mathematics is now the science that describes an

intrinsically open-ended, and hence imperfect, process. In other words, the ideology of a ‘closed world’ is transformed into the science of an ‘infinite

universe’.9

If Bachelard was an essential influence on Althusser, Koyré was a more important figure for Lacan. Indeed, where Bachelard was shaped by the neo-

Kantian rationalism of Léon Brunschvicg, with Koyré the influence of Brunschvicg was supplemented by a more sympathetic interest in Hegel, an interest

he shared with Lacan. In the convergent influences of Althusser and Lacan on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse we witness something like the convergence of

multiple strands in French thought concerned with the same phenomenon, the move from ideology to science. Many of the differences between Althusser

and Lacan - e.g., an emphasis on ‘theoretical practice’ in the former instance, versus an emphasis on discrete cuts in the latter - will be in play throughout

the Cahiers itself. Moreover, the fundamental conceptual ambiguities of the concept of ‘epistemological break’ - Is it world-historical, or local and specific?

If it can be both, is it something that happens ‘once and for all’ or that must be maintained with tenacity? - will inform many of the Cahiers’ central

arguments. The ambiguity of the concept would also be the crucial concern of Althusser’s ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ (1967-68) in which many of

the normaliens affiliated with the Cahiers participated.10. The main purpose of this course was to rethink the proper relationship between philosophy

and science. Althusser argues that, although philosophers cannot provide a meta-theoretical position or generalised epistemology, a generalised theory

of discourse may nevertheless be possible. Regardless, however, philosophy is not to function as a doctrine of science; its task is merely to assist

epistemological breaks.

In this course, Althusser specifically addresses how scientists ‘live’ the breaks and crises of their science both exploited crises in the sciences for

‘apologetic, ultimately religious ends’ (111). The ideal reaction is to treat ‘the contradiction of a process of the recasting [refonte] and growth of scientific

practice and theory … as a philosophical question’:

They are critical not so much of science and its practices as of the naïve philosophical ideas in which they discover they had hitherto lived. They

recognize that the ‘crisis’ has awakened them from their ‘dogmatism’: or better, they recognize, after the event, once they are awakened to philosophy,

that because they are scientists, a philosopher has always slept within them [...] They attempt to give science the philosophy it lacks: the good philosophy

of science. For them, the crisis is the effect, within science, of the bad philosophy of scientists which, until then, reigned over science (113).

Thus the crisis acts as a ‘developer’ that shows what has remained hidden: what Althusser calls the ‘spontaneous philosophy of the scientists’ (115).

Finally, it is worth observing that, although the major concern of this ‘Course’ was established in his previous studies, one proximate stimulus for the

arguments made therein was an essay published by Althusser’s erstwhile professor, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, titled, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un problème

épistémologique?’ (1965). In addition to many of Althusser’s positions being rebuttals of Desanti’s in this article, much of the frame of Althusser’s

approach - including the tripartite process described above - was first set out as such in Desanti’s piece. Indeed, the published version of Althusser’s

course (in French and English) omits two of his own lectures, one reprinted in a recent French edition as ‘Du côté de la philosophie’ (Ecrits

philosophiques et politiques II, Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1995) and another that remains unpublished, titled, ‘Sur Desanti et les pseudo-problèmes de troisième

espèce’, and which is only accessible in Althusser’s personal archive at IMEC in Caen, France. In addition to the text of this lecture, Althusser’s archive

also contains a dossier containing his original, severely marked up copy of Desanti’s article and his correspondence with colleagues concerning its

claims.

In order to explain the concept of ‘epistemological break’ in his 1968 overview of Structuralism in Philosophy, François Wahl built on Badiou’s

Althusserian formulation of the term (in his 1966 article on the ‘(Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism’):

The epistemological break separates an ideology from the science which proceeds in its place, which necessarily proceeds at its expense. We already

know that it concerns a struggle that never ends: if the work of the break is fully accomplished once and for all, at a precise point in the history of

knowledge, nevertheless theoretical practice can never have done with the effort of transforming the ideology that haunts it, and whose specular images

re-establish themselves, ineluctably, in the shadow of each of our activities; a science ‘in its naked state’ does not exist. Structurally, the best definition of

the break would no doubt be that it substitutes for figures of repetition (combined with any number of displacements) of ideology, an authentic procedure

of transformation-exposition, through rearticulation.11

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

In ‘La Science et la vérité’ (CpA 1.1), Lacan directly cites Alexandre Koyré as his ‘guide’ for thinking the relationship between subject and science in the

modern age (CpA 1.1:7; E, 856).Though he does not directly use the expression ‘epistemological break’, Lacan nonetheless addresses the ‘cut’ that

establishes a science. Moreover, he does so with explicit reference to the case of Marx. Lacan cautions that the ‘revolution’ that establishes a new

science does not necessarily lead to a revolution in practice:

An economic science inspired by Capital does not necessarily lead to its utilization as a revolutionary power, and history seems to require help from

something other than predicative dialectic. Aside from this singular point, which I shall not elaborate on here, the fact is that science, if one looks at it

closely, has no memory. Once constituted, it forgets the circuitous path by which it came into being; otherwise stated, it forgets a dimension of truth that

psychoanalysis seriously puts to work (CpA 1.1:20 E, 869).

Lacan also mentions the ‘subjective toll’ of living through scientific crises, citing Georg Cantor as a ‘first-rate tragedy’ led to the ‘point of madness’.

Volume 2 of the Cahiers was devoted to the question ‘Qu’est-ce que la psychologie?’ and contained several pieces in which the relationship

between science and ideology was in play (CpA 2.1CpA , 2.3). The final piece of the issue, Thomas Herbert’s ‘Réflexions sur la situation théorique des

sciences sociales, et, spécialement, de la psychologie sociale’ (CpA 2.6) explicitly develops Althusser’s theses in ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ in a critique

of the ideological character of ‘social psychology’. Herbert (the pseudonym for MichelPêcheux) begins by distinguishing Bachelardian epistemology from

Kantian epistemology, the latter of which is an external reflection on the sciences rather than an assessment of its internal development (CpA 2.6:139-

40). Herbert identifies an ‘epistemological break rupture’ that separates ‘ideological practice’ from ‘theoretical practice’ internal to the sciences themselves

(CpA 2.6:142). But in each instance, an external work of ‘theoretical practice’ can be done to make these ideological elements clear thus making an

‘epistemological break rupture’ possible (CpA 2.6:160). Such is the task Herbert says must be undertaken with social psychology. Herbert invokes Galileo

to make his point. Prior to the advent of Galilean science, astronomy was a mere assemblage of technical practices beholden to the dominant ideology of

the epoch. The ‘rupture’ that establishes science makes the ‘vagabondage’ of these ideological elements retrospectively clear (CpA 2.6:161).

In his unpublished contribution to Althusser’s ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’, François Regnault argued that epistemological breaks [coupures] must

be distinguished from the infra-ideological and infra-scientific ruptures that precede and follow them.12

In his ‘La Pensée du Prince’ (CpA 6.2), Regnault discusses how Machiavelli stood on the cusp of making an epistemological break in the ‘science of

politics’. Machiavelli’s value lies in his having created a ‘place’ for a future science, rather than that science itself. ‘Nobody is capable of inhabiting [nicher]

a break, not Descartes, not Machiavelli, not us, not I - one must be either before or after it’. Thus ‘in order to assign such a break to Machiavelli, one could

also take up the formula M. Canguilhem applies to Galileo: he was in the true, he did not say the true’ (CpA 6.2:37).13 Machiavelli’s materialist politics, as

it stands, remains ‘an epistemological break project, the faithful philosophy of a science yet to come, the owl risen too soon, a monster’.

The problematic of the ‘epistemological break’ informs the Cercle d’Épistémologie’s questions to Michel Foucault, which open volume 9, ‘Généalogie des

sciences’.

In his reply, Foucault implicitly abandons the term ‘episteme’ found in Les Mots et les choses [The Order of Things] (CpA 9.2). He argues that

investigations into epistemologyshould be supplemented with a theory of discursive formations. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, a volume largely

inspired by his exchanges with the Cercle and other critics, Foucault discusses ‘epistemological break thresholds’, but again situates these within a wider

field of discursive statements.In a 1967 interview with Raymond Bellour, Foucault had said, ‘There remains […] between Althusser and myself, an

obvious difference: he employs the term “epistemological break” in relation to Marx, while I affirm that Marx does not represent such a break.’ 14

In her piece, ‘Métaphysique de la physique de Galilée’ (CpA 9.9), Judith Miller reads Galileo with regard to the concept of the ‘epistemological break’. Like

Regnault in his discussion of Machiavelli (CpA 6.2), Miller is concerned to understand the coupure as something that cannot be experienced in itself, but

that divides experience into a before and an after.

Volume 9 also contains Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6), a crucial text at the source of many of the debates within the Cahiers. In

this text, Miller presents the epistemological break that establishes a scientific discourse that is supposedly immune to ideology in terms of the relation

between suture and foreclosure:

[H]ow, then, is such a discourse possible, a discourse which only takes orders from itself, a flat discourse, without unconscious, adequate to its object?

[...] This closing of scientific discourse should not be confused with the suture of non-scientific discourse, because it actually expels lack [elle met le

manque à la porte], reduces its central exteriority, disconnects it from every other Scene. Thought from within the field it circumscribes, this closing

[fermeture] will be given the name:closure [clôture]. But the limit of this circumscription has a density, it has an exterior; in other words, scientific discourse

is not marked [frappé] by a simple lack -rather the lack of a lack is also a lack (CpA 9.6:102).

Miller continues:

Double negation confers positivity to its field, but at the periphery of this field one must acknowledge the structure that makes it possible, and from which

its development is nevertheless not independent. The lack of the lack leaves in every scientific discourse the place of the miscognition, of the ideology

that accompanies it, without being intrinsic to it: a scientific discourse as such includes no utopic element. We need to envisage [figurer] two superposed

spaces, without quilting point [point de capiton], without slippage (lapsus) from the one to the other. The enclosure proper to science therefore operates a

redistribution [répartition] between a closed field, on the one hand, of which one perceives no limit if one considers it from the inside, and a foreclosed

space. Foreclosure is the other side of closure. This term will suffice to indicate that every science is structured like a psychosis: the foreclosed returns

under the form of the impossible (CpA 9.6:102-3)

Miller ultimately locates the complex relationship between suture and foreclosure in the nodal point of the epistemological break itself:

It is in fact the epistemological break that we rediscover [here], but by approaching it from its exterior side we must recognise the privilege and the novel

scientific status of a discourse of overdetermination which constitutes its field at the exterior limit of all science in general, and of which the theoretical as

well as practical (therapeutic or political) injunction is given by the Freudian ‘Wo es war, soll ich werden’, which for us summons the scientific subject to

pull itself together [qui convoque à notre sens le sujet scientifique à se ressaisir] (CpA 9.6/103).

In his ‘Marque et manque: À propos de zero’ (CpA 10.8), Alain Badiou will criticise the intrication that Miller establishes between suture and foreclosure in

this instance, arguing instead that science ‘excludes the institutional operator of [ideological] recapture - the notion of Truth; proceeding instead according

to the concept of a mechanism of production’ (CpA 10.8:150).

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. ‘Sur la dialectique matérialiste’. La Pensée, August 1963. Reprinted in Pour Marx, Paris: Maspero, 1965. ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’.

In For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969. Online at http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/FM65NB.html.

---. ‘Philosophy Course for Scientists’ (1967) in Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists, ed. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 1990.

---. Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock. London: NLB, 1976.

Bachelard, Gaston. Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique. Paris: Alcan, 1934. The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Boston: Beacon, 1985.

---. La Formation de l’esprit scientifique: Contribution à une psychanalyse de la connaissance objective. Paris: Vrin, 1938. The Formation of the Scientific

Mind: A Contribution to a Psychoanalysis of Objective Knowledge, trans. Mary McAllester Jones. Manchester: Clinamen, 2002.

---. La Philosophie du non: Essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scientifique. Paris: Corti, 1940. The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New

Scientific Mind, trans. G.C. Waterston. New York: Orion, 1968.

Balibar, Etienne ‘From Bachelard to Althusser: The Concept of the Epistemological Break’. Economy and Society 7:3 (1978).

Canguilhem, Georges. ‘Dialectique et philosophie du non chez Gaston Bachelard’. Revue Internationale de Philosophie 66 (1963): 441-452.

---. ‘La Signification de l’œuvre de Galilée et la leçon de l’homme’. Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences 17: 68-69 (July-December 1964).

Reprinted in his Études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris: Vrin, 1968.

Canguilhem, Georges. Review of Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Critique 242 (1967). ‘The Death of Man, or the Exhaustion of the Cogito’, trans. C.

Porter. In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Canguilhem, Georges. Idéologie et rationalité dans l’histoire des sciences de la vie: Nouvelles études d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences. Paris:

Vrin, 1977. Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

Desanti, Jean-Toussaint. La philosophie silencieuse, ou critique des philosophies de la science. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Dews, Peter. ‘Althusser, Structuralism, and the French epistemological break Tradition’. In Althusser: A Critical Reader, ed. Gregory Elliott. Oxford:

Blackwell, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

Foucault, Michel. Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. Sylvain Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.

Lecourt, Dominique. Marxism and epistemology: Bachelard, Canguilhem and Foucault, trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1975.

Milner, Jean-Claude. L’Oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Paris: Seuil 1995.

Pêcheux, Michel and Michel Fichant. Sur l’histoire des sciences. Paris: Maspero, 1969.

Wahl, François. La Philosophie entre l’avant et l’après du structuralisme, in Wahl ed., Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Seuil, 1968.

Notes

1. ‘Marx’s theoretical revolution was precisely to base his theory on a new element after liberating it from its old element: the element of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy’, in ‘Feuerbach’s Philosophical Manifestoes’ (1960) in For Marx, 47. ↵2. Ibid., 32, 253-4. ↵3. Ibid., 167-8. ↵4. Ibid., 168. ↵5. Cf. Etienne Balibar, ‘On the Concept of the Epistemological Break’ (1977). Balibar notes that Bachelard’s term was rupture, and not coupure. Balibar also makes this case in this essay that Althusser’s retractions of his erstwhile ‘theoreticism’ concerning the ‘epistemological break’ (cf. Elements of Self-Criticism) were predicated on Althusser’s misunderstanding his own project. Rather than having attempted a general theory of science grounded in the philosophy of dialectical materialism, Althusser had articulated and defended the ‘being in the true’ of historical materialism as a science. Moreover, he did so in such a way as to understand the essential role that ideology plays in social formations, including the social formations that gave rise to Marxism itself. ↵6. Though Bachelard is Althusser’s chief reference for the ‘epistemological break’, the epistemology that he develops ‘for Marx’ in ‘On the Materialist Dialectic’ is equally if not more indebted to Spinoza. Cf. Althusser’s comment in Reading Capital where he describes Spinoza’s thought as a

‘philosophy of the opacity of the immediate’, 16. This theoretical consonance between Spinozism and Bachelardian epistemology is in fact historically grounded in that Spinozism was a itself crucial element of French epistemology, from Brunschvicg to Bachelard. ↵7. Gaston Bachelard, La Philosophie due non, 8-9. ↵8. Ibid., 9. Note that, in French, l’expérience is the word for ‘experience’ in the Anglophone sense of the term, but also for ‘experiment’ as in ‘scientific experiment’. Bachelard’s writings on the philosophy of science make the most of this dual sense in the French context. ↵9. Cf. Jean-Claude Milner, L’Oeuvre claire, where the difference between Bachelard and Koyré precisely on this question of the discreteness or singularity of the rupture is emphasized. In his work, Bachelard elaborates myriad examples, and consequently various forms, of ‘epistemological break rupture’; whereas in Koyré there is only one division, on ‘cut’, that between science. ↵10. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists ↵11. Wahl, La Philosophie entre l’avant et l’après du structuralisme, 381-382. Wahl refers here to Badiou’s ‘Le (Re)commencement du matérialisme dialectique’, Critique 240 (May 1967), 450-51. ↵12. See the introduction to Michel Fichant and Michel Pêcheux, Sur l’histoire des sciences. ↵13. Georges Canguilhem, ‘La signification de l’œuvre de Galilée et la leçon de l’homme’ (1946), in Idem., Études d’histoire et de la philosophie de la science, Paris: Vrin, 46. Canguilhem cites Koyré for this assessment of Galileo. ↵14. Foucault, ‘The Discourse of History’, Foucault Live, 21. ↵

Structural CausalityLa causalité structurale

A key concept in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, inherited from Louis Althusser’s account of the specific interaction of structures and their elements.

See also: 

Cause , 

Lack , 

Structure

Louis Althusser attempted to extract the Marxist theory of society from its Hegelian dialectical origins by reformulating it as a theory of a ‘structured

totality’, composed of economic, social and ideological levels. In Section II of his controversial 1964 essay ‘Marxisme et humanisme’, Althusser showed

that the Feuerbachian and Hegelian principles behind Marx’s1844 Manuscripts were different to those of his ‘mature’ work Capital.1 On

the Hegelian schema ‘history is the alienation and production of reason in unreason, of the true man in the alienated man’. The alienation of labour and

the ‘loss’ of the essence of man ‘produces history’, and ‘at the end of history, this man, having become inhuman objectivity, has merely to re-grasp as

subject his own essence alienated in property, religion and the State to become total man, true man’.2 According to Althusser, Marx. ‘replaced the old

postulates (empiricism/idealism of the subject, empiricism/idealism of the essence) which were the basis not only for idealism but also for pre-

Marxist materialism, by a historico-dialectical materialism of praxis’. For Althusser the shift to a theory of ‘the different specific levels of human practice’

was the key to the validity of the Marxist view of society. Taking up Marx’s analysis in the Introduction to the Grundrisse of the coexistence of the levels of

production, distribution and consumption,3 he contended that social contradiction was ‘inseparable from the total structure of the social body in which is

found, inseparable from its formal conditions of existence, and even from the instances t governs; it is radically affected by them, determining, but also

determined in one and the same movement, and determined by the various levels and instances of the social formation it animates; it might be

calledoverdetermined in principle.’4

In ‘L’Objet du Capital’ in Lire le Capital (1965), Althusser becomes preoccupied the problem of how to think the inter-determination of structures. ‘With

what concept are we to think the determination of either an element or a structure by a structure’?5 This problem is connected with another

methodological problem: if the whole is already structured and all action is caught up in the movement of its specific mechanisms, how is it possible to

present the structure as such? If we are already inside pre-structured relations, how is it possible to gain a vantage point on these structures? These

questions lead Althusser to deal with the problem of structural causality. If, according to Marx, the economic relations of production are ‘determinant in the

last instance’, how is this determination to be thought?

The structure is not an essence outside the economic phenomena which comes and alters their aspect, forms and relations and which is effective on

them as an absent cause, absent because it is outside them. The absence of the cause in the structure’s ‘metonymic causality’ on its effects is not the

fault of the exteriority of the structure with respect to the economic phenomena; on the contrary, it is the very form of the interiority of the structure, as a

structure, in its effects. This implies therefore that the effects are not outside the structure, are not a pre-existing object, element or space in which the

structure arrives to imprint its mark; on the contrary, it implies that the structure is immanent in its effects, a cause immanent in its effects in the Spinozist

sense of the term, that the whole existence of the structure consists of its effects, in short that the structure, which is merely a specific combination of its

peculiar elements, is nothing outside its effects6

In a footnote, Althusser refers to Jacques-Alain Miller’s ‘Action de la structure’ (CpA 9.6), which Miller had distributed as a paper in 1964 before publishing

in volume 9 of the Cahiers‘Metonymic causality’, Althusser writes, is ‘an expression Jacques-Alain Miller has introduced to characterize a form of

structural causality registered in Freud by Jacques Lacan.’ The problematic of structural causality is of central importance for Miller’s work in the Cahiers,

as well as for other contributors such as Thomas Herbert [Michel Pêcheux] and AlainBadiou.

Badiou dwells at length on the problem of structural causality in his 1967 review of Althusser’s work, ‘Le (Re)commencement de la matérialisme

dialectique’. For him, the representation of structural causality within the social system is the key to the problem. Insofar as the economy is ‘determinant,

it nevertheless remains “invisible”, not beingpresented in the constellation of instances, only represented’.

The fundamental problem of all structuralism is that of a term bearing a double function which determines the belonging of the other terms to the structure

insofar as it is itself excluded from them by a specific operation that makes it figure only under the species of its representant (its lieu-tenant [or

placeholder], to take up a concept of Jacques Lacan). It is the immense merit of Lévi-Strauss to have recognised, in the still mixed form of the Signifier-

zero, the true importance of this question.7

Badiou’s solution to the problem of structural causality is different from Miller’s, and their divergence on this theme yields one of the overarching

problematics of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse.8

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

In ‘La Suture’ (CpA 1.3), Jacques-Alain Miller presents a psychoanalytic account of the alternating relation of exclusion and representation that

a subject has with ‘the chain of its discourse’ (CpA 1.3:39; trans. 25-26). The subject ‘figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a

placeholder [tenant-lieu]’. However, while it is ‘lacking’ there, ‘it is not purely and simply absent’. The ‘general relation of lack to the structure of which it is

an element […] implies the position of a taking-the-place-of’ (39). Thus ‘suture’ - Miller’s term for this relation - can be understood as a form of structural

causality, where an excluded element is metaphorically and metonymically represented by means of a ‘stand-in’ or placeholder. Miller’s emphasis on the

representation of a structurally excluded element by means of a placeholder is consistent with Althusser’s conception of structural causality, in which the

determinant instance of the economy cannot be presented as such, but is rather represented inside the structure by a particular, displaced representative.

Where ‘Suture’ expounds the formal mechanism of representation and exclusion, Miller’s other piece in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, ‘Action de la structure’

(CpA 9.6) situates this mechanism within the field of social and linguistic structure. Structure can be minimally defined as ‘that which puts in place an

experience for the subject that it includes’ (CpA 9.6/95). Insofar as a structure lays out places to be occupied, it may be said to analytically contain a

‘virtual’ dimension, alongside the actual plane in which it is incarnated. This permits a distinction between a ‘structuring structure’ and a

‘structured structure’. The ‘subject’ that emerges out of this primary process of structuration is first of all nothing but a support, a ‘subjected subject’. The

relation of the subject to the structure is mediated through an ‘imaginary function of misrecognition’, involving representations that respond to the

fundamental absence in the structuring process, and ‘compensate for the production of lack’ (96). These representations ‘exist only in order to dissimulate

the reason for their existence’. This ‘distortion’ of the structure by the subjectivity it has produced in turn leads to an ‘overdetermination’ of experience by

the structuring process. The production of ‘the lack of the cause’ in ‘the space of its effects’ coincides with the operation of ‘suture’.

Miller suggests that ‘every structure includes a lure which takes the place of the lack, but which is at the same time the weakest link of the given

sequence, a vacillating point which belongs only in appearance to the plane of actuality’. Although the subject is caught in a constitutive misrecognition of

its own position, it is possible to produce a theoretical conversion of perspective that reveals ‘these vacillating points for what they are’: ‘points at which

experiential, structured space intersects with the “transcendental” space of structuration’. Miller contends that this conception affords possibilities for

political transformation, insofar as these ‘vacillating’, ‘utopic’ points indicate the ‘weak links’ of social and political structures. The misrecognitions of

subjects can be examined according to the logic of their displacements. Structural causes may be ‘metaphorised’ in discourse, but their underlying

metonymic causality can still be penetrated. ‘The necessary condition for the functioning of structural causality is that the subject takes the effect for the

cause’ (CpA 9.6); but nevertheless, it is possible to ascend by means of theory to the level of structural determinations, and to target from there possible

sites of practical intervention at the level of actual discourse.

Thomas Herbert’s ‘Remarques pour une théorie générale des idéologies’ (CpA 9.5) can be read as a more concrete, directly politicized version of the

view of structural causality presented by Miller. Herbert makes a fundamental distinction between two types of ideology, the second of which operates

according to a logic of structural causality. Type ‘A’ ideologies have an empiricist form in that their goal is to match significations to a putative ‘reality,’

whereas type ‘B’ ideologies follow an ‘immanent law’ of organization adhering to a ‘speculative-phraseological form’ that establishes coherence in

advance. Whereas an empirically grounded ideology can be discarded by reference to a putative ‘real’ which reveals its inadequacy, a type ‘B’

speculative ideology determines what is admissible, or what can even make sense, in advance (CpA 9.5:78-79). Herbert claims that ideologies of the

speculative form are situated at the level of syntax, that is, in the relation of signifier to signifier, rather than in the semantic ‘adjustment’ of signifier to

signified. Speculative ideologies organize a ‘syntactical’ allocation of places for subjects that is constitutivelyforgotten by those subjects. ‘Let us say briefly

that the putting into place of subjects refers to the economic instance of the relations of production, and the forgetting of this putting into place to the

political instance’ (CpA 9.5:83). Taking up the relationship between (semantic)metaphor and (syntactical) metonymy in Lacanian thought, Herbert shows

how metonymic relations in one domain, e.g., the economic, become metaphorically displaced into, and as a consequence establish relations with, other

domains, such as the political or the ideological. For example, in capitalism, economic relations are effectively metonymical, its constitutive ‘terms’ -

salary, worker, contract, boss, etc. - only making sense in their differential relationship to one another. Through the very organization of the economic field

of production, however, these metonymic sequences become condensed into ‘semantèmes’, units of meaning, displacing these meanings into the

adjacent field of the political, wherein they constitute a ‘politico-juridical axiomatic’ whose own internal coherence blinds it to its economic origins. The

reciprocal functioning of these two levels is grounded in the primacy or the position ‘in dominance’ of the metonymic sequence: ‘As the horizontal

articulation of ideological elements according to a syntactic structure, the metonymic effect produces a rationalization-automisation at all structural levels,

each of which will now appear endowed with “internal coherence.” In this way the subject’s identification to the political and ideological structures that

constitute subjectivity as the origin of what the subject says and does (the norms he states and practices) is produced: this subjective illusionthrough

which, to use a phenomenological expression, the “consciousness of being in a situation” is constituted hides from the agent his own position in the

structure’ (CpA 9.5:88).

Alain Badiou’s ‘La Subversion infinitésimale’ (CpA 9.8) and ‘Marque et manque: À propos du zéro’ (CpA 10.8) attempt to prise the Althusserian

problematic of the representation of structural causality away from Miller’s Lacanian interpretation. In ‘Le (Re)commencement du matérialisme

dialectique’ Badiou implicitly concurred with Miller that the identification of the determining instance in a structure can only be achieved by getting out of

‘the structured’.9 ‘On this problem, J.A. Miller has given an exposition to which reference will be essential. We will try to show elsewhere that 1) the usage

- extraordinarily ingenious - of the construction of number by Frege to illustrate the problem of structural causality is epistemologically inadequate; and 2)

that one cannot think the logic of the signifier as such (as signifier “in general”) except by redoubling the structure of metaphysics’.10 Badiou carries out

these two tasks in ‘Marque et manque’. He identifies an ‘alternating chain in which what is known as “the progress of science” consists’ (CpA 10.8:173).

However, the ‘action’ or ‘motor’ of this progress is science alone. ‘It is not because it is “open” that science has causeto deploy itself (although openness

governs the possibility of this deployment); it is because ideology is incapable of being satisfied with this openness. Forging the impracticable image of a

closed discourse and exhorting science to submit to it, ideology sees its own order returned to it in the unrecognizable form of the new concept; the

reconfiguration through which science, treating its ideological interpellation as material, ceaselessly displaces the breach that it opens in the former’.

Miller’s account of the reciprocal interpenetration of structure and ideological misrecognition must therefore be replaced by a more fundamental

opposition between scientific progress and ideology.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. For Marx [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1969.

Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital [1965], trans. Ben Brewster. London: New Left Books, 1970.

Badiou, Alain, ‘Le (Re)commencement de la matérialisme dialectique’, Critique 23/240, May 1967.

Feltham, Oliver. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss [1950], trans. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge, 1987.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, London: Penguin, 1973.

Wahl, François. ‘Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?’, in Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? 5. Philosophie. Paris: Seuil/Points, 1973.

Notes

1. Althusser, ‘Marxism and Humanism’, in For Marx,223-27. ↵2. Ibid, 226. ↵3. ‘The conclusion we reach is not that production, distribution, exchange and consumption are identical, but that they all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production predominates not only over itself […], but over the other moments as well […]. A definite production determines a definite consumption, distribution and exchange as well as definite relations between these different moments’. Marx, Grundrisse, 99. Althusser writes that ‘the third chapter of the 1857 Introduction can rightly be regarded as the Discourse on Method of the new philosophy founded by Marx. In fact, it is the only systematic text by Marx which contains, in the form of an analysis of the categories and method of political economy, the means with which to establish a theory of scientific practice, i.e. a theory of the conditions of the process of knowledge, which is the object of Marxist philosophy’. Althusser, Reading Capital, 86. ↵4. Althusser, ‘Contradiction and Overdetermination’, in For Marx, 101. ↵5. ‘The Object of Capital’, in Reading Capital, 188. ↵6. Ibid, 188-89. ↵7. Badiou, ‘Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matérialisme’, 457. The reference to Lévi-Strauss is to Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 63-64. ↵8. For an account of Miller’s and Badiou’s theories of structural causality in the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, see François Wahl, ‘Y-a-t-il une episteme structuraliste?’, 115-126. ↵9. Badiou, ‘Le (Re)commencement de la dialectique matérialisme’, 459. ↵10. Ibid, 457. ↵

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004)

Jacques Derrida ranks among the most important thinkers in recent French intellectual history, his name inextricably linked to the concept he coined:

deconstruction. The author of numerous works, Derrida was a world-renowned figure at the time of his death in 2004. Born and raised in Algeria, Derrida

was expelled from his high school in 1942 by a Vichy-backed administration enforcing its anti-Semitic quotas. He came to France in the late 1940s, and

gained admission to the École Normale Supérieure in 1951 after pursuing studies at the lycée Louis-le-Grand. Though he always occupied a peculiar

position within French academia due to the idiosyncrasy of his methods, Derrida found immense success in the Anglophone world, teaching at multiple

universities in the US, and eventually holding a position at the University of California, Irvine from 1986 until his death. Through a series of works

published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Derrida pointed to the aporias of structuralism as a theoretical paradigm, paving the way for a

poststructuralist engagement with the indeterminacy of language and signification as such. Despite the literary style of much of his writing, Derrida’s work

was thoroughly philosophical as well, pursuing a critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’ and the predominance of logocentrism in the history of Western

thought. Inspired by Heidegger, with whose project Derrida remained critically engaged for much of his career, Derrida’s later work witnessed several

‘turns’, from an engagement with questions of politics and ethics, to religion, to an investigation of animality shortly before his death.

While never a member of the Cercle d’Épistémologie, and despite his critical distance from psychoanalysis, Derrida was an intriguing figure to the editors

of the Cahiers due to his early critiques of Husserlian phenomenology. Derrida produced a masters thesis on Husserl in 1954, under the direction of Louis

Althusser, and in 1962 he published a translation of Husserl’s ‘The Origins of Geometry’, which included a long introduction that was approvingly cited in

the Cahiers. In 1964, Derrida became an instructor at the École Normale Supérieure and his contribution to volume four was drawn from his teaching. His

assessment of Lévi-Strauss, with its critique of the Rousseauist distinction between nature and culture and its claims for an operative ‘arche-writing’ that

is at once anterior to speech and a condition of all science, would go on to greater fame after its inclusion in Derrida’s major work Of Grammatology.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Jacques Derrida, ‘Avertissement’, CpA 4.Introduction[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

[TRANS]

Jacques Derrida, ‘Nature, Culture, Ecriture (de Lévi-Strauss à Rousseau)’, CpA 4.1[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Select bibliography

Le Problème de la genèse dans la philosophie de Husserl (1954). Paris: PUF, 1990. The Problem of Genesis in Husserl’s Philosophy, trans. Marian

Hobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Edmund Husserl. L’Origine de la géometrie, traduction et introduction de Jacques Derrida. Paris: PUF, 1962. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An

Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989.

La Voix et le phénomène. Paris: PUF, 1967. "Speech and Phenomena" and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison.

Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

De la Grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Of Grammatologie, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

L’Écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967. Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972. Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

La Carte postale: De Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion, 1980. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

Arguably the most important, and certainly the most controversial, theorist and practitioner of psychoanalysis since Freud, Jacques Lacan was the

foremost influence on the Cercle d’Épistémologie and the key inspiration for the Cahiers pour l’Analyse. Born in Paris in 1901, Lacan pursued studies in

psychiatry and developed close ties with the surrealist movement in the interwar years. Following upon his doctoral work on paranoid psychosis and its

relationship to personality, Lacan made his first crucial contribution to psychoanalysis in 1936 with his presentation on the ‘mirror stage’ of child

development and its formative role in the constitution of the ego. In the early 1950s, Lacan began holding a series of seminars centred on a ‘return to

Freud’. Lacan’s aim was to develop a deliberate alternative to the ‘ego psychology’ that had become the predominant interpretation of Freud in Anglo-

American circles, and which conceived of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice designed to assist the ‘ego’ in its adaptation to the social and material

world. Inspired by similar projects in linguistics and anthropology, Lacan undertook a structural reading of Freud that emphasized the primacy of

the signifier over the signified and that relegated the ego to the domain of the imaginary, emphasizing its distinction from the subject of the unconscious.

His distinction of the subject from the ‘ego’ or ‘consciousness’, accounts for Lacan’s status as one of the most important theorists of subjectivity in recent

European thought.

Lacan’s analytic practices resulted in his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association in 1963 and the transfer of his seminar from the

Saint-Anne Hospital to the École Normale Supérieure following the invitation of Louis Althusser. Lacan’s first seminar in this venue, held in January 1964

and later published as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, was attended by Jacques-Alain Miller and other future editors of the Cahiers

pour l’Analyse. A turning point in Lacan’s own intellectual trajectory, this seminar emphasized the constitutively split nature of the subject and inspired the

structural investigation of subjectivity that would be the dominant theme of the Cahiers. In ‘Science and Truth’, a document which served as the inaugural

lesson of his 1965-66 seminar, the inaugural article in the Cahiers, and the capstone essay of Lacan’s Écrits, Lacan addressed the relationship

between science and psychoanalysis. Arguing that the subject of the latter was also the subject of the former in the modern era, Lacan emphasized

psychoanalysis’s peculiar status as a practice historically conditioned by science and yet capable of pointing to the constitutive ignorance of truth in

scientific discourse, an ignorance that makes science as such possible. Lacan’s formulations concerning the function of truth as cause, and the distinction

of truth from knowledge, laid the groundwork for the debates within the Cahiers over the relationship between science and ideology and the function of

the subject within each discourse.

A source of the Cahiers’s engagement with formalisation, Lacan was inspired by the Cahiers in turn, pursuing an ever more rigorous engagement with

formalism and topology until his death in 1981. In addition to Lacan’s own writings and seminars, the Cahiers pour l’Analyse occupy a crucial position in

the history of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a phenomenon which transcends the contributions and intentions signified by the proper name at its source.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Jacques Lacan, ‘La Science et la vérité’, CpA 1.1[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

Jacques Lacan, ‘Réponses à des étudiants en philosophie sur l’objet de la psychanalyse’, CpA 3.1[HTML]

[PDF] [SYN]

Select bibliography

Écrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.

Le Séminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, 1973. Seminar IX: The Four

Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977.

De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (1932). Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Seminar XII: Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964–1965), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript.

Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966), trans. Cormac Gallagher, unpublished manuscript.

Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil, 2001.

Links to comprehensive bibliographies of Lacan’s writings, in French and in English, can be found at http://www.lacan.com/bibliographies.htm.

Serge Leclaire (1924–1994)

One of the first disciples of Jacques Lacan, Serge Leclaire was a prominent French psychoanalyst who played a special role in the production of

the Cahiers pour l’Analyse by allowing his seminar to be published there and providing a critical perspective on the exploration

of psychoanalysis underway in the journal. Born in Strasbourg with the surname ‘Liebschutz’ to an agnostic Jewish family, his father obtained false

papers with the name ‘Leclaire’ during the Second World War. During his studies of psychiatry, Leclaire met a Hindu monk who introduced him to the

writings of the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto. Shortly thereafter Leclaire entered into analysis with Lacan at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. Leclaire was

Lacan’s close ally through the many ruptures within the French psychoanalytic movement, and would eventually serve as the founder of the Department

of Psychoanalysis at the experimental University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes in 1969.

Leclaire’s contributions to Lacanian psycho analysis and the inscriptive role of the signifier on the body. Within the Cahiers, his pieces caution against a

wholesale appropriation of psychoanalytic discourse that obscures the unique relation between analyst and analysand. Moreover, while making use of

Jacques-Alain Miller and Jean-Claude Milner’s contributions to Lacanian theory, Leclaire argues that what is lost in their analyses is a sense of what

makes some signifiers more prominent than others, i.e., what distinguishes ones that pertain to the discourse of the unconscious from those that do not.

In an extensive reading of the ‘Wolf Man’ case in volume five, Leclaire warns against ‘the error of making the signifier no more than a letter open to all

meanings,’ and argues that ‘a signifier can be named as such only to the extent that the letter that constitutes one of its slopes necessarily refers back to

a movement of the body. It is this elective anchoring of a letter (gramma) in a movement of the body that constitutes the unconscious element, the

signifier properly speaking’. This emphasis on the inscriptive role of signifiers is also evident in Leclaire’s books Psychanalyser (1968) and On tue un

enfant (1975), the former of which played a key role in communicating the novelty of the Lacanian intervention in psychoanalysis to a wider audience. His

contribution to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse was decisive not only because it granted the imprimatur of a practicing analyst, but also because it actively

explored the relation of psychoanalysis to other discursive frameworks and practices central to the journal’s concerns without losing sight of the specificity

of clinical practice.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Serge Leclaire, ‘L’analyste à sa place?’, CpA 1.4[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

[TRANS]

Serge Leclaire, ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse (Séminaire de l’ENS, 1965-1966)’, CpA 1.5[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Serge Leclaire, ‘Note sur l’objet de la psychanalyse’, CpA 2.5[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Serge Leclaire, ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse (Séminaire de l’ENS, 1965-66)’, CpA 3.6[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Serge Leclaire, ‘Les éléments en jeu dans une psychanalyse (à propos de l’Homme aux loups)’, CpA 5.1[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Serge Leclaire, ‘Compter avec la psychanalyse (Séminaire de l’ENS, 1966-67)’, CpA 8.6[HTML]

[PDF][SYN]

Select bibliography

Psychanalyser. Paris: Seuil, 1968. Psychoanalyzing: On the Order of the Unconscious and the Practice of the Letter, trans. Peggy Kamuf. Palo Alto, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1998.

Démasquer le réel. Paris: Seuil, 1971.

On tue un enfant, Paris: Seuil,1975. A Child is Being Killed: On Primary Narcissim and the Death Drive, trans. Marie-Claude Hays. Palo Alto, CA:

Stanford University Press, 1998.

Rompre les charmes. Paris: Inter Éditions, 1981.

Le Pays de l’autre. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

État des lieux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Albin Michel, 1991.>

Demeures de l’ailleurs: 1954-1993. Paris: Arcanes, 1996.

Ecrits pour la psychanalyse, Paris: Seuil, 1996.

Principes d’une psychothérapie des psychoses. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

Œdipe à Vincennes. Paris: Fayard, 1999.

Jean-Claude Milner (1941–)

Currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Université de Paris-VII, and a former director of the Collège Internationale de Philosophie (1998–2001),

Jean-Claude Milner has pursued a diverse intellectual career comprised of academic contributions to linguistics, critical engagements with

Lacanian psychoanalysis, as well as, more recently, a series of essays concerning anti-Semitism in European history and culture. For the past several

years, Milner has held a seminar devoted to this theme at the Institut d’études levinassiennes in Paris. In 1960, after completing his khâgne at the lycée

Henri-IV, Milner entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he took courses with Louis Althusser and developed a close friendship with Jacques-

Alain Miller, a friendship that would be instrumental in the founding and direction of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse several years later. Among the members of

theCercle d’Épistémologie, for which he served as secretary, Milner was notable for his special interest in linguistics. In addition to following the teaching

of Jacques Lacan, Milner also displayed an early engagement with the writings of Roland Barthes and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom would secure

for Milner a short term postdoctoral fellowship at MIT in 1966. The exposure to Noam Chomsky’s work was formative for Milner, who translated

Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) into French in 1971. In many ways faithful to Lacan’s original teaching despite these heterogeneous

influences, his work also displays an engagement with Anglophone philosophy of science (e.g., Popper and Lakatos) that accounts for Milner’s unique

perspective on the Lacanian enterprise; see in particular Milner’s L’Oeuvre claire (1995).

Like many of the normaliens involved in the Cahiers, Milner experienced May 1968 as a cataclysmic personal and political event. In the years that

followed, he was an active participant along with Jacques-Alain Miller in the Maoist group the Gauche Proléterienne. Milner has recently published his

reflections on these years, which contrast greatly with those of Alain Badiou, in a book titled L’Arrogance du présent (2009). Despite their current

differences, much of Milner’s work in the wake of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse concerning the nature and function of names was instrumental for Badiou’s

project well as for many others inspired by Lacan’s reconfiguration of the modern subject. In his works L’Amour de la langue (1978) and Les Noms

indistincts (1983), Milner developed the conception of language to be found in his most significant contribution to the Cahiers, ‘Le Point du signifiant’. In

this article, a reading of Plato’s Sophist, Milner suggested that the proper name functions as the mark of an errant negativity, or non-being, that alternately

serves as a function or term in discursive sequences. With his emphasis on the essentially vacillating and errant nature of subjectivity, Milner negotiated a

path between the positions in the journal represented by Miller and Badiou.

In the Cahiers pour l’Analyse:

Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Avertissement’, CpA 2:Introduction [HTML][PDF]

[SYN] [TRANS]

Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Avertissement’, CpA 3:Introduction [HTML][PDF]

[SYN] [TRANS]

Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Le point du signifiant’, CpA 3.5 [HTML][PDF]

[SYN] [TRANS]

Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Grammaire d’Aragon’, CpA 7.2 [HTML][PDF]

[SYN]

Jacques-Alain Miller & Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Avertissement: Nature de l’impensée’, CpA 8:Introduction

[HTML][PDF]

[SYN] [TRANS]

Select bibliography

Arguments linguistiques. Paris: Mame, 1973.

De la syntaxe à l’interprétation. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

L’Amour de la langue. Paris: Seuil 1978 [republished by Verdier, 2009]. For the Love of Language, trans. Ann Banfield. New York: Macmillan, 1990.

Ordres et raisons des langues. Paris: Seuil, 1982.

Les Noms indistincts. Paris: Seuil, 1983. [Republished by Verdier, 2007].

De l’école. Paris: Seuil, 1984. [Republished by Verdier 2009].

Détections fictives. Paris: Seuil, 1985.

Dire le vers (with François Regnault). Paris: Seuil, 1987. [Republished by Verdier, 2008].

Introduction à une science du langage. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Constat. Paris: Verdier, 1992.

Archéologie d’un échec: 1950-1993. Paris: Seuil, 1993.

L’Oeuvre claire: Lacan, la science et la philosophie. Paris: Seuil, 1995. Extract translated as ‘The Doctrine of Science’, trans. Oliver

Feltham. Umbr(a): Science and Truth 1 (2000): 33-63.

Le Salaire de l’idéal. Paris: Seuil, 1997.

Le Triple du plaisir. Paris: Verdier, 1997.

Mallarmé au tombeau. Paris: Verdier, 1999.

Constats [contains Constat, Le Triple du plaisir, and Mallarmé au tombeau]. Paris: Gallimard, 2002.

Le Périple structurale: figures et paradigme. Paris: Seuil, 2002. [Republished by Verdier, 2008].

Existe-il une vie intellectuelle en France? Paris: Verdier, 2002.

Le Pas philosophique de Roland Barthes. Paris: Verdier, 2002.

Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Paris: Verdier, 2003.

Voulez-vous être évalué? (with Jacques-Alain Miller). Paris: Grasset, 2004.

La Politique des choses. Paris: Navarin, 2005.

Le Juif de savoir. Paris: Grasset, 2006.

L’Arrogance du présent: regards sur une décennie. Paris. Grasset, 2009.