Derrida had already rejected Lacan’s reading of the purloined letter on the ground that, of all the signifiers, “Lacan” is the only one for which the prerogative not to participate in the chain of sliding signifiers is retained. Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Lacan, the subject that is mistakenly supposed to know but ostensibly the subject that claims to know nothing, indeed knows much more that he is willing to admit, to himself as well as to others (see “Le facteur de la vérité” in The Postcard).
Lacan’s response had already come three years prior to the publication of Derrida’s critique; it consisted of the mathemes that, though they may serve the function of “forms of language,” do not constitute a meta-language (Seminar 20, On Feminine Sexuality, 118). After all, Lacan argued, no formalization of language is transmissible without the use of language itself. Consequently, there is no such thing as a meta-language and Derrida’s charge that the analyst had positioned himself as a meta-, i.e. as outside the circuit of letter exchange, is an error.
In positing the mathemes, Lacan claimed to have evacuated subjectivity, and especially his own subjectivity qua master of a theory and guardian of a practice, from the core of psychoanalytic knowledge. Each formula is supposed to acquire a reading only in its use and, moreover, is created in order “to allow a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as the spoken remains caught in its algebra” (Ecrits, 313).
Ironically, it did not take long for the mathemes as a formalization of psychoanalytic knowledge, as, in other words, the theory and signpost of a practice, to become the gatekeeper that normalizes access to both the theory and the practice. In the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son-in-law, heir to the throne, and the spokesperson of the hyper-logical strain in Lacanism: “the thesis of the matheme thus implies that only an effective engagement in an original work pursued within or on the basis of the Freudian field will henceforth constitute credentials for the exercise of a function in the department” (quoted in Jacques Lacan & Co., 570). This injunction was circulated in 1974; the department in question was the recently established Department of Psychoanalysis at Vincennes; no mere metaphor, the Freudian Field was indeed the title of the influential psychoanalytic series published by the Editions du Seuil under the directorship of Lacan. Both department and book series were soon to be taken over by Miller.
While in the early seventies quantum mechanics began to give way to chaos theory as the third and last of the twentieth century’s most influential theories in physics (see here), Lacanism, under its new found banner of the matheme, began to give way to chaos itself. Pontalis, Laplanche, and Guattari had already left the Lacanian camp; Leclaire and Irigaray were soon to follow. As well, Lacan’s Ecole freudienne was plagued by schisms that soon led to the proliferation of various dissident groups that would challenge the master’s authority, analytically and institutionally; the Quatrième group, the Forth Group, is among the most notable of these. All of this was precipitated in part at least by the rise of the hyper-logical tendency and the increased control its champion, the dreaded Miller himself, was to have over the various branches of the Lacanian field: the text of Lacan’s seminar, the training institute, the academic department, and finally the publishing arm.
