I’m sharing transcripts from a discussion I had with Derek Hook in December 2021 for his YouTube Channel. We discussed Heidegger, Lacanian psychoanalysis and my book, Discourse Ontology. What follows is the transcript of our conversation, very slightly edited for clarity.
For the actual video (part 3), see here:
For part 1 and 2 of the transcription click here and here.
For the actual video (part 3), see here:
For part 1 and 2 of the transcription click here and here.
Part 3:
Heidegger's concept of 'das Man' (the They) can be both compared to - and contrasted with - Lacan's idea of the big Other. One crucial related idea, as Christos Tombras notes, is that the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (which is of course so crucial to Heidegger), is rejected by Lacan. The project of a Discourse Ontology, as outlined by Tombras, includes the attempt to formalize Lacanian concepts, to formulate the philosophical background of the account of the human subject as developed by Lacan. (DH)
Heidegger's concept of 'das Man' (the They) can be both compared to - and contrasted with - Lacan's idea of the big Other. One crucial related idea, as Christos Tombras notes, is that the distinction between the ontic and the ontological (which is of course so crucial to Heidegger), is rejected by Lacan. The project of a Discourse Ontology, as outlined by Tombras, includes the attempt to formalize Lacanian concepts, to formulate the philosophical background of the account of the human subject as developed by Lacan. (DH)
Previous:
Derek Hook:
I mean, just a quick association, which perhaps we shouldn't actually go into, but it's amazing this work of bringing one concept into play, because then another concept comes up. You know, I was speaking about discourse as a kind of possibly provisionally shared concept, and then we start thinking about truth. Then we start thinking about the Bejahung, this kind of primal affirmation. And of course, it made me think, however erroneously, we have in Freud a primal affirmation, Bejahung, that is a necessary precondition and a way for negation, and that realm of affirmation also made me think a little bit about the Clearing in Heidegger. It is a very different concept, but I suppose, you know, there's this odd sensation in doing this kind of work where you get the concepts, they sort of clash, they're banging to each other, they have this awkward reverberation despite overlapping, and then they move away from one another again.
And of course, for me, one of those, a case in point, as a Lacanian reading Heidegger, when he talks about das Man and he talks about the they, you know, it's hard not for me at least to hear one echo, an aspect of the Lacanian Big Other.
Do you see any resonance or anything interesting between these two concepts, das Man and Big Other?
Christos Tombras:
Yes! I would address the question in the similar way as I addressed your question earlier about discourse.
And I said that discourse in Heidegger, I see it more related to the chatter of das Man. So I think that das Man —of course, they are connected, not connected, connectable — but the functions of the two things are different.
Heidegger thinks of das Man, the they, the others, the chatter, as this which is actually distracting Dasein from the moral task of getting to grips with his or her authenticity— authenticity in the sense, whatever it is their own, ownmost. In order to contrast that with what the world is doing, he invents the they, das Man, and says “Man does that”. That means, “they say that it's good to pay your taxes”, “they say —something”. It is a collective, not a collective non-sense, but a collective understanding of the world.
So it is connected to discourse. It is connected to the milieu in which Dasein is finding themselves in and as such, it's something that has to be recognised and — not avoided, but taken a distance from.
For Lacan, the Big Other is the necessary backdrop onto which we have —Let me start a different way: We have the signifiers and signifiers are connectable to other signifiers, they form a network. As I indicated earlier, the subject is a product of this signifying chain. But it is not a necessary product. It requires a human being who acts according to some desire within that chain of signifiers. And this is where desire comes in.
So, the human being is the subject, the human subject; it's a product of a network of signifiers, which network of signifiers obtains a basis of reference, a field, a foundation-like field on what the others say, the symbolic order.
The symbolic order is a necessary place that we can refer and say, how do you know that when you say table, you mean a table? I know it because they say so. But this is not chatter anymore. This is the founding event. The fact that they say so makes a table a table, the fact that there are people and they say it. And this fact, that there are people and say it, can be summarised thus: there is a symbolic order which is distinct from me, a human being, was there before I came into being, was there and was forced onto me when I entered into language. And I am now checking each and everything I say or I think against that symbolic order and yes, against that Big Other.
But I have made, when I do that as an individual, as a human being in language, I have made that a bit more strong than it is. Originally, it is not strong at all. It is just chatter. But I elevate it, in my mind, each and every one of us, into a symbolic thing that has strength, stability, and can be used as a guarantee of safety. The symbolic order is necessary in that respect, and the implications of that concept are huge in the clinic.
Because there are human beings, there are subjects of language, who do not have this very stable background on which they can rest their anxiety and their uncertainty. This could be described as psychosis. I don't want to go into psychopathology here, but the Lacanian understanding of psychosis, it is an understanding of a human being, in language, which — the human being— is not really very stable in how they find, they found their chain of signifiers in connection to the symbolic order. The symbolic order is failing.
To cut a long story short, the symbolic order or the Big Other, in Lacan, has an importance, which is clinical, and not only philosophical or metaphysical, as it is the importance of the They in Heidegger. And in that respect, the two thinkers diverge. This is something that Heidegger does not even thematise in his mind.
But an important thing that has to be remembered here is that this jump into belief that the symbolic order is big, out there, stable, is an arbitrary belief.
There is nothing to justify it really.
And this is the sense of what Lacan says when he says, there is no Other of the Other.
There is no guarantee that this is the case. We have to take it that this is the case. But there is no guarantee, because there is no metalanguage, because the distinction between ontic and ontological, it doesn't apply to return it to the previous question.
DH:
Ah, okay. That's a marvellous articulation, bringing back that idea in such a powerful way. Oh, really appreciate that.
We should maybe start to wrap up a little bit. But as a way of doing that, I mean, here comes the big question, really. Tell us about Discourse Ontology. What do you mean by a discourse ontology? What is it? How can we think of it?
CT:
Yes. Okay. I tried to indicate earlier that I use discourse, I understand discourse in this way, the Lacanian way, that the human being, the subject, is a product of a discourse. Okay, that's a Lacanian idea, it's not my idea.
I take the term ontology with all knowledge of the traditional import, but I prune all the old metaphysical, non-useful connotations of the concept, and I take it to mean, A collection of entities and how we engage with these entities... Ontology.
Anyway, these two things together, I bring them together, and I'm saying that what I would propose to do is to formalise ideas that are present in Lacan, but he hasn't had time to formalise. Example of an idea is the idea of truth. What is Truth? Lacan always refers to, but he doesn't formalize it. Mm-hmm. So I'm suggesting —truth is one of the ideas, it's not the only idea— What I'm suggesting is that now that the work of Lacan has been completed, because Lacan is no longer working on it, it is useful, I claim, to take his conceptualizations and formalise them in a way that could be responding to criticisms such as those a potential Heidegger would have. So it is like formulating a philosophical background of the Lacanian understanding of the human being.
I would think that the first important thing is the Speaking Being and the fact that the speaking being, by the virtue of the fact that they are speaking, they refer to signification and the origin of signification. Lacan has the term for that, is signifierness. What is it that makes a signifier signifier? What is it? That is signifierness. So this is the first concept, important one.
The second is Truth. And I take truth in the way I described it earlier, not as a correspondence between statement and state of affairs, because we are before that, but something that is not unrelated to the Bejahung of Freud or the Clearing of Heidegger, the Alethea. So truth, you could say that this is a Heideggerian addition to the project, but it's not solely Heideggerian, it's also Lacanian.
Then an important concept is Time. What is time? Not time in the sense of in physics, what is time in physics, but what is time in the human being and in connection to the concept of signification, which is a crucial question of Heidegger. You have that in Being and Time. Time is a crucial aspect of being able to signify things, because just to give an indication, when you signify something, when you have a name for something, you make it present where it is not present anymore. And that means you free it from time. You make it present here while it is not here anymore, either because it's not existing anymore or because it's not present in locality. So time is the next part.
And then it's obviously, perhaps not so obviously, but for me it's important, crucial, the Body, because all of this is coming from the body. And here a discussion of jouissance or sexuation, and sexuality, but sexuation is the step before sexuality comes in. And this is something which is completely absent in Heidegger, as we said earlier.
And then all of this, how do they fit together into producing a world, is the concept of the World.
So these are the five themes I would think that the discourse on ontology would have to have. And I claim that it is useful because it would provide Lacanian psychoanalysis —theory— with this metapsychological foundation that is now only implied. In my view, it needs to be spelled out. And after we know it, what we deal with, we can actually start clarifying the concepts, because many of the Lacanian concepts are either redundant or overlapping, but not completely overlapping. It needs to be cleared up. The Lacanian arsenal of concepts and thinking has to be cleared up. That's not for him only, for everybody. You could say that for Heidegger, you could say that for Freud, you could say that for anyone, but I say that for Lacan. It needs to be cleared up. And this is a first attempt to start clearing up things.
DH:
I mean, it's a very elegant way of stating what a prospective project of Lacanian ontology would be, ontology, provided we understand it in terms of how you've defined it, and an intriguing project as well. You used the term formalisation, and I suppose maybe this could be the very last question. You know, for me, it's one of the great areas within Lacan's attempts at transmission of psychoanalysis that always amazes and impresses and inspires me, the multiple different modes through which he would try to formalise the crucial teachings of psychoanalysis, whether that's topology, whether it's mathemes. And of course, waiting in the wings here is the question of what kind of mathematical formalisation might be implied by the project that you're suggesting. And I mentioned that also just because obviously, I know you've worked with Bernard Burgoyne, and I know some of your other work, but I suppose that's my question: The formalization that would be required to do this inspiring and amazing project that you're speaking about, would that entail a type of mathematical formalisation? Is that what you're thinking?
CT:
I'm following Lacan in this. Lacan is using mathematics. The important thing, I think, is to understand a tiny bit more what kind of mathematics, what is mathematics for Lacan. Because if we start with this assumption that there is no metalanguage, that, there is no distinction between ontic and ontological — things like this, which are Lacanian, and they can be argued for. Then what is mathematics? Many people would think, many people would try to say that there is a contradiction here, because mathematics seems to be beyond and above all of these things. What does Lacan mean when he brings in mathematics? How can these things reconcile? Of course, this is a question that touches on questions of philosophy of mathematics.
But I take that mathematics is a type of discourse. It's a human activity. It's not something that could exist without humans. And, it is the most abstract way we have at present to describe things that entail the very concepts that we are using to describe them. That's the tricky thing with the human endeavour. We're trying to discuss about ourselves, about language, using ourselves and language. There's always something circular. And mathematics is the best tool we have managed to construct that can allow some abstraction in this circular enterprise. Unavoidably circular, because I do not know if there are extraterrestrials. I do not know if there are angels. I do not know if there are all these entities that might be studying human beings from elsewhere. If they do, they don't need any of these tools that we're talking about. But we are here, and we need to be able to speak about things.
So if we have — go back to this question of discourse— if we have the discourse as being that that describes how signifiers connect with each other, and we have this idea that the subject is a product of this connectability of signifiers, and it is occupying, inhabits these connected signifiers, if we have that, we need some tool to describe how this is working. At the time of Lacan, the best tool was topology, which is a formalised, discursive way of describing anything at all. Everything. This very abstract mathematics of the type that Lacan is advocating, does not speak about specific entities. It's not about numbers as such. It's not about human beings. It's not about signifiers. It's about anything that can be connected. And this idea, for example, in Seminar XX, Lacan speaks about set theory and compactness, and how… With all these concepts that Lacan is using, he is trying to address questions of how do signifiers connect with each other, and what can we say about the connectability of them and the obstacles to the connectability of them. A mathematician would say limits, boundaries, neighbourhoods.
What I think is needed for this, let's say, — now that Lacan has completed— next step would be an understanding of mathematics that takes into consideration time. Time, not only the sense of temporal, the temporal aspect of doing mathematics, that is, I started and then I finished, but also the fact that we're talking about entities, and the entities are being written on the paper. And as such, the entities which are written on the paper are already signifiers of something. So, we have an inherent circularity, even in the way we are trying to approach things, of the things we are trying to describe.
I don't have a clue— I'm getting a bit vague here, because I don't have a clue how this can be done. But I envisage, I know that there are some mathematicians who have worked and work on this field currently. Bernard Burgoyne is working specifically about mathematics and topology in connection to clinical structures. But I'm talking about other mathematicians who are working on the basic premises or ideas of what is a thing. How can you differentiate a thing from not a thing? Not nothing, not a thing.
I do not have the answers, but these are things that I'm interested very much in actually pursuing.
DH:
Christos, thanks very much. Inspiring, opening up further avenues, and, I was going to use mathematical term, further neighbourhoods. But hopefully that will be a topic of a future conversation. So thanks again.
CT:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the opportunity you gave me to speak about all of these interesting things.
DH:
Thanks. Sure.
Derek Hook:
I mean, just a quick association, which perhaps we shouldn't actually go into, but it's amazing this work of bringing one concept into play, because then another concept comes up. You know, I was speaking about discourse as a kind of possibly provisionally shared concept, and then we start thinking about truth. Then we start thinking about the Bejahung, this kind of primal affirmation. And of course, it made me think, however erroneously, we have in Freud a primal affirmation, Bejahung, that is a necessary precondition and a way for negation, and that realm of affirmation also made me think a little bit about the Clearing in Heidegger. It is a very different concept, but I suppose, you know, there's this odd sensation in doing this kind of work where you get the concepts, they sort of clash, they're banging to each other, they have this awkward reverberation despite overlapping, and then they move away from one another again.
And of course, for me, one of those, a case in point, as a Lacanian reading Heidegger, when he talks about das Man and he talks about the they, you know, it's hard not for me at least to hear one echo, an aspect of the Lacanian Big Other.
Do you see any resonance or anything interesting between these two concepts, das Man and Big Other?
Christos Tombras:
Yes! I would address the question in the similar way as I addressed your question earlier about discourse.
And I said that discourse in Heidegger, I see it more related to the chatter of das Man. So I think that das Man —of course, they are connected, not connected, connectable — but the functions of the two things are different.
Heidegger thinks of das Man, the they, the others, the chatter, as this which is actually distracting Dasein from the moral task of getting to grips with his or her authenticity— authenticity in the sense, whatever it is their own, ownmost. In order to contrast that with what the world is doing, he invents the they, das Man, and says “Man does that”. That means, “they say that it's good to pay your taxes”, “they say —something”. It is a collective, not a collective non-sense, but a collective understanding of the world.
So it is connected to discourse. It is connected to the milieu in which Dasein is finding themselves in and as such, it's something that has to be recognised and — not avoided, but taken a distance from.
For Lacan, the Big Other is the necessary backdrop onto which we have —Let me start a different way: We have the signifiers and signifiers are connectable to other signifiers, they form a network. As I indicated earlier, the subject is a product of this signifying chain. But it is not a necessary product. It requires a human being who acts according to some desire within that chain of signifiers. And this is where desire comes in.
So, the human being is the subject, the human subject; it's a product of a network of signifiers, which network of signifiers obtains a basis of reference, a field, a foundation-like field on what the others say, the symbolic order.
The symbolic order is a necessary place that we can refer and say, how do you know that when you say table, you mean a table? I know it because they say so. But this is not chatter anymore. This is the founding event. The fact that they say so makes a table a table, the fact that there are people and they say it. And this fact, that there are people and say it, can be summarised thus: there is a symbolic order which is distinct from me, a human being, was there before I came into being, was there and was forced onto me when I entered into language. And I am now checking each and everything I say or I think against that symbolic order and yes, against that Big Other.
But I have made, when I do that as an individual, as a human being in language, I have made that a bit more strong than it is. Originally, it is not strong at all. It is just chatter. But I elevate it, in my mind, each and every one of us, into a symbolic thing that has strength, stability, and can be used as a guarantee of safety. The symbolic order is necessary in that respect, and the implications of that concept are huge in the clinic.
Because there are human beings, there are subjects of language, who do not have this very stable background on which they can rest their anxiety and their uncertainty. This could be described as psychosis. I don't want to go into psychopathology here, but the Lacanian understanding of psychosis, it is an understanding of a human being, in language, which — the human being— is not really very stable in how they find, they found their chain of signifiers in connection to the symbolic order. The symbolic order is failing.
To cut a long story short, the symbolic order or the Big Other, in Lacan, has an importance, which is clinical, and not only philosophical or metaphysical, as it is the importance of the They in Heidegger. And in that respect, the two thinkers diverge. This is something that Heidegger does not even thematise in his mind.
But an important thing that has to be remembered here is that this jump into belief that the symbolic order is big, out there, stable, is an arbitrary belief.
There is nothing to justify it really.
And this is the sense of what Lacan says when he says, there is no Other of the Other.
There is no guarantee that this is the case. We have to take it that this is the case. But there is no guarantee, because there is no metalanguage, because the distinction between ontic and ontological, it doesn't apply to return it to the previous question.
DH:
Ah, okay. That's a marvellous articulation, bringing back that idea in such a powerful way. Oh, really appreciate that.
We should maybe start to wrap up a little bit. But as a way of doing that, I mean, here comes the big question, really. Tell us about Discourse Ontology. What do you mean by a discourse ontology? What is it? How can we think of it?
CT:
Yes. Okay. I tried to indicate earlier that I use discourse, I understand discourse in this way, the Lacanian way, that the human being, the subject, is a product of a discourse. Okay, that's a Lacanian idea, it's not my idea.
I take the term ontology with all knowledge of the traditional import, but I prune all the old metaphysical, non-useful connotations of the concept, and I take it to mean, A collection of entities and how we engage with these entities... Ontology.
Anyway, these two things together, I bring them together, and I'm saying that what I would propose to do is to formalise ideas that are present in Lacan, but he hasn't had time to formalise. Example of an idea is the idea of truth. What is Truth? Lacan always refers to, but he doesn't formalize it. Mm-hmm. So I'm suggesting —truth is one of the ideas, it's not the only idea— What I'm suggesting is that now that the work of Lacan has been completed, because Lacan is no longer working on it, it is useful, I claim, to take his conceptualizations and formalise them in a way that could be responding to criticisms such as those a potential Heidegger would have. So it is like formulating a philosophical background of the Lacanian understanding of the human being.
I would think that the first important thing is the Speaking Being and the fact that the speaking being, by the virtue of the fact that they are speaking, they refer to signification and the origin of signification. Lacan has the term for that, is signifierness. What is it that makes a signifier signifier? What is it? That is signifierness. So this is the first concept, important one.
The second is Truth. And I take truth in the way I described it earlier, not as a correspondence between statement and state of affairs, because we are before that, but something that is not unrelated to the Bejahung of Freud or the Clearing of Heidegger, the Alethea. So truth, you could say that this is a Heideggerian addition to the project, but it's not solely Heideggerian, it's also Lacanian.
Then an important concept is Time. What is time? Not time in the sense of in physics, what is time in physics, but what is time in the human being and in connection to the concept of signification, which is a crucial question of Heidegger. You have that in Being and Time. Time is a crucial aspect of being able to signify things, because just to give an indication, when you signify something, when you have a name for something, you make it present where it is not present anymore. And that means you free it from time. You make it present here while it is not here anymore, either because it's not existing anymore or because it's not present in locality. So time is the next part.
And then it's obviously, perhaps not so obviously, but for me it's important, crucial, the Body, because all of this is coming from the body. And here a discussion of jouissance or sexuation, and sexuality, but sexuation is the step before sexuality comes in. And this is something which is completely absent in Heidegger, as we said earlier.
And then all of this, how do they fit together into producing a world, is the concept of the World.
So these are the five themes I would think that the discourse on ontology would have to have. And I claim that it is useful because it would provide Lacanian psychoanalysis —theory— with this metapsychological foundation that is now only implied. In my view, it needs to be spelled out. And after we know it, what we deal with, we can actually start clarifying the concepts, because many of the Lacanian concepts are either redundant or overlapping, but not completely overlapping. It needs to be cleared up. The Lacanian arsenal of concepts and thinking has to be cleared up. That's not for him only, for everybody. You could say that for Heidegger, you could say that for Freud, you could say that for anyone, but I say that for Lacan. It needs to be cleared up. And this is a first attempt to start clearing up things.
DH:
I mean, it's a very elegant way of stating what a prospective project of Lacanian ontology would be, ontology, provided we understand it in terms of how you've defined it, and an intriguing project as well. You used the term formalisation, and I suppose maybe this could be the very last question. You know, for me, it's one of the great areas within Lacan's attempts at transmission of psychoanalysis that always amazes and impresses and inspires me, the multiple different modes through which he would try to formalise the crucial teachings of psychoanalysis, whether that's topology, whether it's mathemes. And of course, waiting in the wings here is the question of what kind of mathematical formalisation might be implied by the project that you're suggesting. And I mentioned that also just because obviously, I know you've worked with Bernard Burgoyne, and I know some of your other work, but I suppose that's my question: The formalization that would be required to do this inspiring and amazing project that you're speaking about, would that entail a type of mathematical formalisation? Is that what you're thinking?
CT:
I'm following Lacan in this. Lacan is using mathematics. The important thing, I think, is to understand a tiny bit more what kind of mathematics, what is mathematics for Lacan. Because if we start with this assumption that there is no metalanguage, that, there is no distinction between ontic and ontological — things like this, which are Lacanian, and they can be argued for. Then what is mathematics? Many people would think, many people would try to say that there is a contradiction here, because mathematics seems to be beyond and above all of these things. What does Lacan mean when he brings in mathematics? How can these things reconcile? Of course, this is a question that touches on questions of philosophy of mathematics.
But I take that mathematics is a type of discourse. It's a human activity. It's not something that could exist without humans. And, it is the most abstract way we have at present to describe things that entail the very concepts that we are using to describe them. That's the tricky thing with the human endeavour. We're trying to discuss about ourselves, about language, using ourselves and language. There's always something circular. And mathematics is the best tool we have managed to construct that can allow some abstraction in this circular enterprise. Unavoidably circular, because I do not know if there are extraterrestrials. I do not know if there are angels. I do not know if there are all these entities that might be studying human beings from elsewhere. If they do, they don't need any of these tools that we're talking about. But we are here, and we need to be able to speak about things.
So if we have — go back to this question of discourse— if we have the discourse as being that that describes how signifiers connect with each other, and we have this idea that the subject is a product of this connectability of signifiers, and it is occupying, inhabits these connected signifiers, if we have that, we need some tool to describe how this is working. At the time of Lacan, the best tool was topology, which is a formalised, discursive way of describing anything at all. Everything. This very abstract mathematics of the type that Lacan is advocating, does not speak about specific entities. It's not about numbers as such. It's not about human beings. It's not about signifiers. It's about anything that can be connected. And this idea, for example, in Seminar XX, Lacan speaks about set theory and compactness, and how… With all these concepts that Lacan is using, he is trying to address questions of how do signifiers connect with each other, and what can we say about the connectability of them and the obstacles to the connectability of them. A mathematician would say limits, boundaries, neighbourhoods.
What I think is needed for this, let's say, — now that Lacan has completed— next step would be an understanding of mathematics that takes into consideration time. Time, not only the sense of temporal, the temporal aspect of doing mathematics, that is, I started and then I finished, but also the fact that we're talking about entities, and the entities are being written on the paper. And as such, the entities which are written on the paper are already signifiers of something. So, we have an inherent circularity, even in the way we are trying to approach things, of the things we are trying to describe.
I don't have a clue— I'm getting a bit vague here, because I don't have a clue how this can be done. But I envisage, I know that there are some mathematicians who have worked and work on this field currently. Bernard Burgoyne is working specifically about mathematics and topology in connection to clinical structures. But I'm talking about other mathematicians who are working on the basic premises or ideas of what is a thing. How can you differentiate a thing from not a thing? Not nothing, not a thing.
I do not have the answers, but these are things that I'm interested very much in actually pursuing.
DH:
Christos, thanks very much. Inspiring, opening up further avenues, and, I was going to use mathematical term, further neighbourhoods. But hopefully that will be a topic of a future conversation. So thanks again.
CT:
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the opportunity you gave me to speak about all of these interesting things.
DH:
Thanks. Sure.
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