Introduction Our contemporary moment might be referred to as the ‘era of the ones-all-alone.’[1] During this era, where is the sujet suppose savoir (SSS)?[2] Perhaps it is in the field of the One, and not, as was once believed, in the field of the Other. It is the One who presupposes knowledge. This position should be distinguished from neurotic suppositions of the Other, where unconscious knowledge is a product of repression. Consequently, knowledge now functions according to metrics of certainty and confusion rather than doubt. I can therefore only offer seven saturated signifiers, an alternative SSS: (1) mortification, (2) surplus jouissance, (3) semblant, (4) fixion, (5) One, (6) love, and (7) negation. These slippery signifiers offer an orientation amidst temptations toward stubborn certainty and wandering confusion. On the one hand, Lacan maintained that certainty be taken as a trademark of psychosis. On the other hand, he dedicated an entire seminar to the elucidation of the thesis that it is the ‘non-dupes’ who wander. (I would add that not all those who wander are ‘non-dupes.’) My argument is that the negativity of our time remains saturated in the positivity of jouissance, even when that negativity is a theoretical construction of psychoanalysis (e.g., sociological and political theories of the ‘death drive’[3]).
Signifier (-) → Jouissance (+) ⇒ Jouissance (-) → objet petit a (+)
How could we interpret this formalization? The signifier functions to negativize jouissance, but, in doing so, deposits a residue, a part which continues to resist the signifier, into another register as objet petit a. In this sense, an equivalence of objet petit a and surplus jouissance occurs; except that the former, objet petit a, emerges as a consequence of the perseverance of the latter, surplus jouissance. What is most ‘surplus’ about objet petit a is jouissance as such, which means that the surplus or excess is not an element that perpetuates beyond the signifier’s mortification but is rather that which exists indifferently to it. It was why Lacan chose to use the homophonic expression ‘père-severe:’ to highlight the importance of the concept of ‘severance’ in relation to the paternal signifier. He developed his popular thesis of lalangue (the ‘babbling’ of language) to accommodate the implicit thesis that jouissance perseveres against the negativity of the paternal signifier, le père. Hence, there is an apparent difference between ‘severance from’ (or ‘severity of’) the father, le père, and the negativity that this function would have introduced. Ultimately, what perseveres is the rejection of the negativity of the signifier.Truth is coupled with meaning, and the two of them make a trio with fiction. Lacan’s later teaching consists in the realization that the symbolic order -- which in his earlier teaching was the motor of the structure of the analytic experience, and of what Freud called the psyche -- belongs to the register of fiction. In other words, the signifier is a semblant (Miller, 2009).
In summary: for Lacan, truth has the structure of a fiction, which means that truth remains a category of the Freudian unconscious inasmuch as it relates to the knowledge discovered beyond repression (e.g., castration). Truth is a fiction that defends against the Real of the mortifying signifier, signifier-one.What is striking is the amount of time that it took me to realize that this expression which Lacan uttered, ‘there is such a thing as a One,’ as a sort of cry, is the counterpoint to ‘there is no such thing as a sexual rapport.’ I realized that, on the one hand, there is this sentence which says what there is not, that there is no One, which supposes two halves that fit together [...], and, on the other hand, there is the discrete One, [...] an element separated from the Others [...] (Miller, 2022; my translation).
What is this ‘discrete’ One? Perhaps the most striking statement in this regard was made by Lacan in 1977: “there is nothing Other [since] it is the One who knows, and not the one supposed to know” (Lacan, 1977). I take this ‘one supposed to know’ as the subject supposed to know (SSS) in the field of the Other. Yet, that Other has shifted into another register. The concept of the One is therefore not an imaginary fusional One of the couple who dreams of holding each other ever more tightly. It is not the One that aims to overcome the impossibility of a sexual rapport, or of lack. Rather, the One is on the other side, that of a jouissance which repeats and which remains stubbornly opposed to an impossible sexual rapport. It is the One outside of any dialectic, yet nonetheless inside of a repetition. There is a portion of jouissance that repeats the Real of the symptom; in relation to which we can locate a Real that remains fixed in its place. We can therefore conclude that the One is the Real of the symptom [sinthome], that which within the repetition returns always to the same place. The One which returns to the same place in the Real is referred to as the ‘one-all-alone.’ Miller elevated this concept to the dignity of a title during his pivotal seminar of 2011. He said that “[w]hat we mean by fixation-point is that there is a One of jouissance which forever returns to the same place, and for this reason we call it Real” (Miller, 2011; my translation). Put in simpler terms, the ‘one-all-alone’ is signifier-one of the Real, discoverable in the symptom, or, as Nancy Gillepsie has put it: “a one-all-alone is an S1 [signifier-one] that is removed from the Other and does not connect with an S2 [knowledge, meaning, sense]” (Gillepsie, 2018). This is why we might write, regarding the perseverance of the symptom: S1 // S2 → S3 → Sn. This formula might be read that the signifier-one is decoupled from the chain of signifiers, such that the chain of signifiers perpetuates. The unconscious may also be taken as ‘one-all-alone,’ as a signifier of the Real, decoupled from meaning and interpretation, forever waiting for the S2 that would hold it tight. Hence, there is the Freudian unconscious, which is the unconscious of mortification, and there is the Lacanian unconscious, which is the unconscious of the Real and of pere-severance. Finally, if, as Lacan once said, ‘love is what makes up for the lack of a sexual rapport,’ then perhaps it is possible to discover a ‘new’ love, one that does not depend upon the coupling of an S1 and an S2 but rather begins from the ‘one-all-alone.’ A ‘new love’ implies the reinvention of one’s relationship not only to the unconscious but also to psychoanalysis. The concept of ‘new love’ means precisely this: that it is up to each one of us to reinvent our relationship to the unconscious and to psychoanalysis.[Lacan] correlates the act of wandering with a refusal to love one’s unconscious. This refusal is the consequence of knowledge gained about the unconscious during the analytic cure. Lacan emphasizes knowledge that is ‘annoying.’ The symptom is the depository of this particular knowledge. Is it thus the symptom that allows one, at the end of analysis, to refuse to love one’s unconscious, in other words to wander (Mendelsohn, 2011).
For this reason, Lacan distinguishes the Freudian unconscious -- which is the transferential unconscious of meaning, otherwise referred to as the ‘symbolic unconscious’ -- from the Lacanian unconscious. The latter is what Jacques-Alain Miller later named the ‘Real’ unconscious, or what, during the 24th seminar, Lacan referred to as the ‘one-blunder’ (a homophone of ‘unconscious,’ une-bévue). This discovery was implicit in much of Lacan’s later teaching, and he even made it quite clear when he said that “the unconscious isn’t Freudian, it’s Lacanian, though it doesn’t stop the field from being Freudian” (Lacan, 1977b). At other times he said simply that ‘there is the Freudian unconscious, and there is ours.’ The problem is that the Freudian unconscious becomes foreclosed, such that, it seems to me, the only way forward is to fall in love with it. From the perspective of the ‘ones-all-alone,’ then, what is required is a ‘new love,’ since, as Miller has put it: “love is what can mediate between the ones-all-alone” (Miller, 2004).This view of negation fits in very well with the fact that in analysis we never discover a ‘no’ in the unconscious and that recognition of the unconscious on the part of the ego is expressed in a negative formula (Freud, 1937: 239).
There is no negation within the unconscious but it is nonetheless possible that the unconscious could instigate a negation. This would mean that it could be taken as a ‘signifier-one.’ Thus, negativity can be introduced by other means. It would institute the unconscious as a one-blunder in jouissance, the blunder of jouissance imposed as a signifier. Lacan seemed to propose (during his 19th seminar) that the unconscious could be taken as a signifier:The signifier One is not one signifier among others, [...] But this is where I recognize that this here One is but knowledge superior unto the subject, that is, unconscious insofar as it manifests itself as existing -- the knowledge, I say, of a Real of the One-all-alone, all-alone right where relation would be said.[6]
What is it that we ultimately find in the later teaching of Lacan on the concept of negativity? I believe that we implicitly discover what I call ‘false negatives.’ Even the Freudian unconscious does not want to know anything about its positivity, that is, about what endures beyond the impasses of the Oedipus complex, beyond castration. The signifier can instigate a false negativity, one that the subject believes in as a semblant, so that the fundamental fantasy can not only be constituted but perpetuated. The ultimate fantasy of psychoanalysis is negativity, and it is what sustains our passage into any possible dialogue; indeed into the social bond and discourse. It is why I claim that negativity is one of the great fantasies of psychoanalysis. A psychoanalyst is simply one who, beyond the ‘pass’ of fantasy, invents a way of living without the negativity of the paternal signifier. The risk of a cynical endpoint of psychoanalysis is all the more disconcerting, and I cannot help but wonder if one confronts a choice there between cynicism, isolation, or, finally, what Lacan referred to as the ‘pass.’ It demonstrates for me the necessity of the psychoanalytic School, its cartels, and its politicization and institutionalization. Discourse, for Lacan, constitutes a social bond.[7] Every discourse except for the psychoanalytic one is authorized by a master signifier, and this signifier presents obstacles to the ‘fusional One’ of love. The capitalist discourse, discovered during the later period of Lacan’s teaching, introduces a paradox: there is a discourse without any enduring social bond and without obstacles, hence, without love. Sex becomes generalized precisely due to its removal from the discourse: “that was capitalism’s starting point: getting rid of sex” (Lacan, 1990: 30). Yet, sex, within the prior discourses was not simply an inherent antagonsim or negativity; it becomes revealed within capitalist discourse as positivized. Whereas the subject was once sexed by the social order, it is clear that the social order itself has become sexed while the subject merely becomes complicit in the operation. This is why Lacan moved from the concept of ‘subject’ to that of parletre, speaking-being, since it is the being who speaks with its jouissance that takes center stage. Conclusion We cannot claim that the Western world needs anymore to examine the dark figures that are lurking in its attic, as in the oft-repeated Freudian analogy of the ‘id-ego-superego.’ Indeed, the Western world is in the midst of a serious housing crisis. There is a movement from a logic of the unheimlich, or unhomely, toward that of radical homelessness. It is not coincidental that ‘foreclosure’ is a word that has been popularly used also to discuss the emergence of the housing crisis in the United States. Homelessness is not a product of repression but rather of a foreclosure of the unconscious, it is the instigation of the Lacanian unconscious. It is not simply that there are foreign intruders in our homes, but also, and more fundamentally, that our homes are built upon the turbulent seas, or, as in a Dr. Seuss book:You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?[8]
There are nonetheless indications that the concept of homelessness was already implicit, though in a confused state, within Freud’s theory of the unheimlich. For example, Freud pursued within his essay two rather curious adjacent theses: (1) ‘repetition compulsion,’ a theory of always returning to the same (e.g., Freud’s example of trying to leave an area of the city only to return to the same place), and (2) infantile projections or delusions (e.g., castration anxiety revealed in the Real via Teddy Bears and stories about the Sandman). ‘There is no negation in the unconscious’ for Freud, and yet, for Lacan, a dream is nonetheless a way to falsely represent negation:[Freud] even goes so far as to wonder if the unconscious has a way of expressing ‘negation.’ First he says ‘no’ [...] then he says that even so the dream finds a trick for itself in designating ‘negation.’ Does ‘no’ exist in the dream? That’s a question Freud leaves open, and on which he contradicts himself, that’s for sure (Lacan, 1977; my translation).
The dream is a fiction which can offer us some tricks for allowing mortifications to be believed. Lacan eventually said that the unconscious is ‘precisely the hypothesis that we do not dream only when we are asleep.’ It means that it’s possible that we make use of a few tricks in our waking life, indeed during our analyses, for designating negations. Perhaps one such trick comes in the form of political and philosophical discourses which, within our field, present us with theories of ‘death drive.’ These tricks for designation negation give us reason to doubt that there is an opposition to the concepts of ‘severance’ and ‘negation,’ and they bolster our claim that jouissance is a fundamental psychoanalytic concept. To do away with the concept of jouissance is to sustain the dream of a theory of negativity; or, clinically, it is to persevere in the pain of our symptoms. So much of what are called the ‘new symptoms,’ which include depression, eating disorders, panic attacks, and so on, but also what we refer to, sociologically, as war, woke culture, and polyamory, should be discussed as a dream that we experience in waking life. Yet, during the night - you will not escape its nightmares.You can get so confused
that you’ll start in to race
down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
and grind on for miles cross weirdish wild space,
headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
The Waiting Place...
...for people just waiting (Dr. Seuss).[9]