The Limitation of Language in Intimate Relation - Drive as the Phenomenology of Manque
ENGLISH
Philosophy of Intimacy and the Theory of Justice · Paper XXVI
The Limitation of Language in Intimate Relation
Wanhong Huang
书不尽言，言不尽意。
Writing does not exhaust speech; speech does not exhaust meaning.
— after the Book of Changes, Xici
致她——
For her—
那个属于森林的女孩， — the girl who belongs to the forest,
在我词穷之处，你仍在。 — where my words run out, you are still there.
致我最爱的人。 To the one I love most.
Abstract
This paper proposes that language has a limit, and that the limit is generative. Across six dimensions of relational life, its existence, its maintenance, the value it generates, its ethics, its justice, and its evolution, there is in each case a core that language reaches toward and cannot reach. The paper sets out these six limits, each as a claim of its own, and then argues that what stands at the limit is drive in the psychoanalytic sense. Drive is not a content language omits and might recover; it is the phenomenology of manque, the gap between the symbolic and the Real that resists complete symbolization. This gap has two faces, a pre-symbolic remainder cut off when the subject enters language and a resulting impossibility of closure, and they are one. Around it drive circles and desire slides. By a thought experiment the paper shows that closing the gap would extinguish rather than fulfill them, so that the non-closure of language is the condition of their persistence. It then follows drive into the time of relation and draws out the generativity of the limit in the poem, in an ethics without possession, and in a justice that guards what it cannot settle, with a coalgebraic and reduction-theoretic counterpart offered as a heuristic. The paper offers no final synthesis; its form enacts its content.
Keywords: the limit of language; manque; drive; desire; the Real; objet petit a; generative relational being.
AI usage statement: The ideas, claims, and theoretical framework of this paper originate with the author. AI tools were used as an aid in drafting and revision. Every sentence has been checked by the author line by line, and the origin of each idea verified, so that the author takes full responsibility for the content.
PART ONE · The Six Dimensions of the Limit of Language
§1 The Limit Proposed, Not Lamented
There is an old habit of treating the limit of language as a defect. On this habit, language is an instrument for the transport of meaning, and wherever it fails to carry meaning across, it has fallen short of what it was for. The failure is then met with resignation, with the wish for a fuller language, or with a mysticism that points past speech to a silence it cannot itself enter. This paper takes a different route. It does not lament the limit of language and does not propose to overcome it. It proposes that the limit is the condition of something, and that the something is the very life of relation.
The proposal
The proposal can be stated at once. In each of the dimensions along which a relation lives, its coming into being, its being kept alive, the value it generates, the ethics it asks of those within it, the justice it owes, and the way it grows and turns into new forms, language reaches toward something it does not reach. This paper first lays out these six limits one by one. It gives each of them its own shape, so that the limit of language is seen not as a single vague insufficiency but as six distinct and structured phenomena, each with its own core that speech circles and does not touch, and each stated as a claim of its own.
The paper then makes its central move. What stands at the limit, in each of the six cases, is not an absence to be regretted. It is the site at which drive, in the sense psychoanalysis gave the word, becomes possible. Drive is not one more content that language happened to leave out and might, with better instruments, recover. Drive is the phenomenology of that limit itself. It is the way the gap between what can be said and what presses beneath saying shows itself, the felt form of a remainder that the operation of the signifier can never close. This is why the attempt to say the drive returns not the drive but its renewed escape. To symbolize the gap is to find that the gap has moved, because the gap is nothing other than what symbolization cannot close.
What follows from it
From this the rest follows. If the limit is the site of drive, then the non-closure of language is not a wound in relation but the open space in which relation keeps moving. A relation in which everything had been said, in which the other had been wholly reached, in which no remainder stirred beneath the words, would be a relation in which nothing further pressed, nothing further turned, nothing further was generated. The completeness so often wished for would be the end of the very thing it wished to secure. This consequence, argued in Part Two by a thought experiment, governs the whole account: closure is not fulfillment but extinction, and the openness of the limit is what keeps a bond alive.
The path of the paper
The paper proceeds in five parts. Part One sets out the six limits, giving each its own structure and its own claim: the ungroundability of the bond’s existence, the uncapturability of the living present, the absence of any external place to price relational value, the aesthetic measure of the ethical response, the generativity that justice guards, and the direction of growth that cannot be said in advance. Part Two traces the shared form of these six to its source in the constitution of the speaking subject, gives the gap its two faces and its object, distinguishes the drive that circles from the desire that slides, and establishes by a thought experiment that the closure of the gap would extinguish rather than fulfill them, from which the paper’s central claim follows, that drive is the phenomenology of the limit. Part Three follows the persistence of drive into the time of relation, where an early signifier goes on organizing later bonds, the symptom appears as a fidelity to what cannot be said, and the good bond is shown to consist in making room for the other’s unsymbolizable core. Part Four draws out the generativity of the limit in three registers, the poem as a language that circles the gap without closing it, an ethics that generates a bond without possessing the other, and a justice that guards the generativity of relational being against premature settlement. Part Five closes without a synthesis, in keeping with what the paper argues, since a work about what language cannot reach ought not to pretend, in its last pages, to have reached it.
Method and stance
Two remarks on method. First, the paper states its own contributions as named claims, set off from the prose, so that what it proposes can be found and weighed apart from the argument that leads to it. Second, at each dimension and each register the paper passes through the relevant literature not to survey it but to locate, in each account, the point it reaches toward and the remainder it leaves, so that the review is everywhere in the service of the position and never a catalogue.
A remark on stance. This is a constructive paper and not a polemical one. It sets up no adversary and refutes no school. Where it passes near positions that would treat full communication as an ideal, or transparency between persons as the measure of a good bond, it does not stop to defeat them but builds a different account and lets the difference speak. The traditions it engages, in speech-act theory, in phenomenology, in the theory of value, in psychoanalysis, in the ethics of the other, and in the study of testimony, are taken as sources of insight to be positioned, each having reached toward the same limit from its own side.
§2 The Being of a Relation
This section takes the first of the six dimensions, the sheer existence of a relation, and establishes a single result: that the being of a bond, its that it is as distinct from any account of what it is like, cannot be grounded by any proposition, and that this ungroundability is not a defect in relational language but the condition under which the existence of a relation can be a matter of fidelity rather than of record. The section states the phenomenon, sets it against the two traditions that would seem to close it, isolates the core that neither reaches, and draws the claim.
The phenomenon
Take first the plain fact that a relation exists. Two people are bound, or they are not; the bond is alive, or it has died. Language seems obliged to be able to say which, and it holds the sentences ready to hand. We are together. This is real. I am yours. These sentences present themselves as if they could establish the existence they announce, as if to say the bond were in some measure to make it, or at least to fix and secure it against doubt. The appearance is strong enough that a whole practice of reassurance rests on it, the practice of asking to be told, and of telling, that the bond is there.
They do not establish it. The sentence we are together neither proves that the bond exists nor brings it into being. It can be spoken over a bond already hollow, and it can be withheld from a bond fully alive. The existence of a relation is not the kind of thing a proposition can ground. Whether the bond is real is settled somewhere the sentence does not reach, and every sentence about it arrives after the fact it would establish, a report on a state it did not produce and cannot guarantee. The being of the relation lies outside all the signifiers that would name it.
Two ways of trying to close the gap, and why they do not
Two traditions promise to close exactly this gap, and it is worth seeing why neither does, since the reason is instructive.
The first is the performative account of speech. Austin taught that some utterances do not describe a state of affairs but bring one about, that to say the words is, under the right conditions, to do the deed. I now pronounce you; I promise; I name this ship. It can look as though I am yours belongs to this class, an utterance that makes the bond it declares. But the performative works only where a convention stands ready to be invoked and a procedure exists whose completion the words execute. The marrying words marry because an institution recognizes them; the naming names because a practice confers the name. The existence of a living bond has no such institution behind the words. There is no procedure whose correct performance constitutes the reality of love, no convention on whose authority I am yours could execute the bond it speaks. The performative closes the gap between word and deed only where an institution has already closed it; for the bare existence of a relation, no institution has, and the words fall back into report.
The second is the ideal of transparent communication, the thought that a bond is secured when the two have made themselves fully intelligible to each other, when nothing of either remains unsaid. Habermas built a whole ethics on the regulative ideal of communication free from distortion, oriented to mutual understanding. On such a view the existence of a good bond would be underwritten by the completeness of the understanding reached within it. But understanding, however complete, is understanding of what the other says and shows, and the existence of the bond is not something either party says or shows. It is presupposed by everything they say and shown by nothing. Two people can understand each other to the last word and still face the question of whether the bond between them is alive, because that question is not answered at the level of understanding at all. The transparency ideal, pressed to its limit, would deliver a perfect mutual intelligibility beneath which the existence of the bond would remain exactly as ungrounded as before.
The core
What both traditions reach for and miss is the same. The core language cannot reach here is the sheer existence of the bond, its that it is, as against all the descriptions of what it is like. Descriptions there can be in abundance. The tone of a morning, the history of a quarrel and its repair, the shape of an ordinary evening, all of this can be said, and much of it can be said well. What cannot be said, because it is of a different order from any description, is the fact that beneath all these there is a bond at all, living now, in force now. That fact is presupposed by every description and secured by none of them. It is not a further, especially deep description that better language might supply. It is not a description at all, and that is why no description reaches it.
Claim — The ungroundability of the bond. The existence of a relation, its being-in-force as distinct from every account of its qualities, cannot be established by any proposition. No performative constitutes it, for it invokes no institution; no completeness of mutual understanding underwrites it, for it is presupposed by all understanding and shown by none. The being of the bond lies outside the signifier that would name it.
An illustrative case — the reassurance that settles nothing. One partner asks to be told that the bond is real, and the other tells them, and the words are true and warmly meant. Yet the asking returns, not from distrust of the answer but because the answer, however true, is not the kind of thing that could settle the question. What was wanted was not a sentence but the standing of the bond itself, and no sentence delivers that standing. The recurrence of the asking is not a fault in either party. It is the mark that the existence of a bond lies where no reassurance can put it, outside the reach of any words that would confirm it.
Why the limit is generative here
Far from being a defect, this ungroundability is what lets the existence of a relation be a matter of fidelity rather than of record. Because no sentence can ground the bond, the bond rests on something other than a sentence, on a holding that must be renewed and cannot be filed away as done. Consider the counter-case, a relation whose existence could be established by a form of words. Its existence, once the words were produced, would be settled, on record, no longer at stake; and a bond no longer at stake is a bond one possesses by having produced its title. The limit forbids exactly this. Because the existence of the relation can never be put on record, it can never be possessed as a title, and so it remains what it must be to be a bond at all, a thing continually at stake, held open, renewed in the holding. The reader will recognize, without its needing to be argued here, that a promise carrying no external guarantee stands closer to this condition than a contract does: the contract puts the bond on record and thereby makes it a title; the promise, guaranteeing nothing, leaves the bond where the existence of a relation always is, outside the record and in the keeping. The ungroundability that looked like a poverty of language is the very thing that keeps the existence of a relation an act.
§3 The Living Present
This section takes the second dimension, the maintenance of a relation through time, and establishes that what maintenance depends on, the living present in which two people are actually with each other, cannot be occupied by any statement, because the act of stating already places the speaker at a distance from the moment stated. The result is that maintenance is a matter of presence rather than of statement, and the section shows this by way of the phenomenon, a review of the two accounts that would make the present sayable, the isolation of the core, and the claim.
The phenomenon
A relation is not only brought into being; it is kept. Maintenance is the work of holding a bond alive through time, and what it holds is not a record of the past but a living present, the felt now in which two people are actually with each other. Language seems able to reach this present. We have the tense for it. I love you now. I am here. This is the present indicative, the grammatical form of the current moment, and it appears made to seize exactly what maintenance depends on.
It does not seize it. By the time I love you now has been said, the now it names has slipped past. The present of feeling, the actual current in which the relation is alive, is always a step ahead of the signifier that would fix it, so that speech about the present is always speech about a present just departed. The word arrives late. What it catches is not the living now but the trace of a now already becoming past, and the living now itself, the thing maintenance most needs to hold, is precisely what runs out from under every attempt to state it.
Two accounts of the sayable present, and their remainder
Two accounts promise that the present can, after all, be reached in speech, and each illuminates the limit by the exact manner of its failure.
The first is the account of the performative present, the deictic now. Linguistics observes that words like now, here, I, and this take their reference from the very act of utterance; the now of I love you now just is the moment of speaking, so it seems the word cannot lag the moment it names, since it names whatever moment it is spoken in. But this only relocates the lag. The deictic now refers to the moment of utterance, yet the living present that maintenance needs is not the instant of an utterance; it is the felt current of being-with, which is not itself an act of speech and which the utterance interrupts in order to name. When I stop being with you in order to say that I am with you, the saying occupies the moment the deixis points to, and the being-with it would report has been set aside for the duration of the report. The deictic present is real, but it is the present of the speaking, not the present of the bond, and these are not the same present.
The second is the phenomenological account of the living present, which comes nearer the truth and for that reason marks the limit more precisely. Phenomenology describes the present of experience not as a knife-edge instant but as a thick now that carries the just-past in retention and the about-to-come in protention, so that the living present is always already a passage rather than a point. Merleau-Ponty makes perception itself this temporal thickness, a present that is never a bare instant but a field in motion. This is exactly right about the present that maintenance inhabits, and it is precisely what defeats the statement. A statement fixes; it arrests a content and holds it still for predication. The living present, being a passage and not a point, cannot be arrested without being stopped, and stopped it is no longer the living present but a still taken from it. Phenomenology thus tells us why the present cannot be said: to say it is to fix it, and to fix a passage is to end the passing that made it alive.
The core
The core language cannot reach here is the present of the relation, its currentness, the being-now of the bond as against every account of how it was a moment ago. The relation lives in a present that speech cannot occupy, because the act of speaking already places the speaker at a small distance from the moment spoken of, and because the moment in question is a passage that fixing would end. One can narrate the relation, and narration has its place, but narration is always of the just-past, and the living edge on which the bond is actually sustained stays ahead of the narration, uncaptured.
Claim — The uncapturability of the present. The living present in which a relation is sustained cannot be occupied by any statement. The deictic present belongs to the act of speaking and not to the being-with it would report; the thick present of experience is a passage that fixing would arrest and so end. What maintenance rests on stays ahead of every sentence that reaches for it.
An illustrative case — the photograph of the moment. Two people try to hold an evening by recording it, a photograph, a note written the same night, a message that says exactly how it feels now. Later the record is faithful and the moment is gone from it, present only as something the record points back to and does not contain. The living being-together that the evening was cannot be found in what was saved of it. This is not the failure of a poor record. The best record would do no better, because the present it would hold is a passage, and what is saved of a passage is always a still from which the passing has been removed.
Why the limit is generative here
This is what makes maintenance a matter of presence rather than of statement. Because the living present cannot be said, it can only be inhabited, and the keeping of a relation is not the repeated production of true sentences about it but the repeated occupation of a present that no sentence holds. Consider again the counter-case, a bond whose current moment could be fixed in words. Its maintenance would consist in keeping the words up to date, in issuing at each moment the true sentence for that moment, a maintenance of the record rather than of the bond; and a relation maintained by keeping its record current would be one in which presence had been replaced by reporting. The limit forbids this substitution. Because the living present cannot be caught in a sentence, maintenance cannot be discharged by sentences, and is thrown back onto presence itself, onto the being-there that no report replaces. The uncapturability that looked like a failure of the present tense is what keeps maintenance an inhabiting rather than a filing. It is also the temporal form of desire, which slides from signifier to signifier precisely because no signifier ever coincides with the present it reaches for, a movement the paper takes up in Part Two.
§4 Relational Value Without a Place to Be Priced
This section takes the third dimension, the value generated within a relation, and establishes that such value cannot be named as a magnitude, because quantification presupposes an external place from which worth is assessed, and a value that exists only within a relation grants no such place. The result is that relational value cannot be extracted or priced, and this is what keeps it living in the bond rather than available to be drawn off. The section proceeds through the phenomenon, a review of the accounts that would render relational value assessable, the isolation of the core, and the claim.
The phenomenon
Within a relation, value is generated. Something comes to matter, to weigh, to be worth caring for, and this worth is not carried in from outside but arises in the bond itself. Language seems able to reach this value. We have the vocabulary of worth ready: what this means to me, how much you matter, what our years together are worth. These phrases present value as if it were a magnitude, a quantity that speech could name and, naming, fix.
They do not fix it. The value generated in a relation is not a property lodged in either person, to be read off and reported. It is generated in the relation and exists only there, in the between, and this is what defeats the naming. To name a value as a magnitude is to assume a place from which the naming is done, a standpoint outside the thing valued from which its worth can be assessed and set down. For a value that exists only within a relation there is no such outside place.
Two ways of trying to assess it, and why they fail
Two lines of thought promise that relational worth can be brought into a common measure, and each fails in a way that shows the structure of the limit.
The first treats the value in a bond as a form of capital. Bourdieu extended the economic vocabulary of capital to goods that are not money, cultural capital and social capital among them, and analyzed relationships as holdings that can be accumulated, converted, and made to yield. On this account the worth generated in a relation would be a stock of social capital, in principle measurable by what it can be converted into. The account captures something real about how relationships function within fields of power, and it fails at exactly the point that concerns us. The value that social capital measures is the value a relationship has for something outside it, its convertibility into advantage; the value generated within the bond, the worth the bond has in itself and for those in it, is precisely what does not convert, what cannot be cashed into any external advantage without ceasing to be the thing it was. Social capital measures the relation from outside, in the currency of what it yields; the value in question is the one that has no yield outside the relation, and so no place in the ledger of capital.
The second is the appeal to a common measure of value as such, the assumption, built into any optimization or cost-benefit frame, that distinct goods can be ranked on a single scale so that trade-offs among them can be computed. Raz argued against exactly this assumption for certain goods, holding that some values are incommensurable, that there is no common measure by which, for instance, the worth of a friendship and a sum of money could be compared, and that to attempt the comparison is not to make a difficult judgment but to commit a kind of error about what the values are. The worth generated within a relation is incommensurable in this sense. To ask what it is worth in any external currency, to seek its magnitude on a common scale, is not to pose a hard question but to misunderstand the value, which is not the kind of thing that has a magnitude on a scale shared with other things. Raz names the error; the present account gives its ground, in the next paragraph.
The core
The core language cannot reach here is the relational generation of value, its arising in the between rather than in either party, which is also its refusal of any external place from which it could be quantified. The point is not that the value is large, or hard to compute, or private. The point is structural, and it grounds the incommensurability Raz observed. Quantification presupposes an outside knower who could assign a magnitude to any worth, a position from which all value is in principle assessable, a place occupied, in the theological figure the series has used elsewhere, by an Other who could price everything. A value generated only within a relation denies that such a position exists for it, since to occupy the position would be to stand outside the relation, which is to stand where the value is not. There is no assessor clear of the bond from which the bond’s own generated worth could be measured, because the worth does not exist anywhere the assessor could stand. Incommensurability, at this level, is not a curious fact about certain goods; it is the consequence of a relational ontology of value, on which there is no external vantage from which relational worth could be brought to a common measure, because relational worth is nowhere but in the relation.
Claim — No external place to price the relation. Value generated within a relation cannot be assigned a magnitude, because quantification requires a standpoint outside the valued thing from which worth is assessed, and relational value exists only within the relation, offering no such standpoint. The incommensurability of relational goods is not a brute datum but a consequence of the relational generation of value: there is no Other positioned to price what exists only in the between.
An illustrative case — the years that have no price. Asked what a long shared life is worth, one finds the question not hard but wrong, and the wrongness is instructive. It is not that the figure is large or hard to compute. It is that there is no currency the worth converts into, no external ledger where it could be entered, because the worth exists only in the bond and nowhere a price could be set. To name a sum would not undervalue the years; it would misdescribe them, treating as a magnitude on a common scale what has its being only in the relation.
Why the limit is generative here
This is what keeps relational value from being a possession or a price. Because the worth generated in a bond cannot be set down as a magnitude, it cannot be extracted from the bond and carried off, cannot be banked, traded, or realized elsewhere. Consider the counter-case, a relational value that could be fully priced. Priced, it could be sold; realized in an external currency, it could be drawn off, and the relation would be left holding a figure where the bond had been. The limit forbids this. Because relational value has no external place to be assessed, it has no external place to be cashed, and so it stays where it was generated, in the living bond, unavailable to extraction. This will matter in Part Four, where the capture of relational value by external powers is shown to work only by first supplying the very forms in which the value is generated, since the value itself, once generated within the bond, offers capital no place to seize it. For now the point is only that the worth generated within a relation, having no place to be priced, has no place to be taken, and that this ungraspability is what keeps it a living worth rather than a realizable asset.
§5 The Aesthetic Measure of the Ethical Response
This section takes the fourth dimension, the ethical demand a relation makes, and establishes that at its root the ethical response rests on an aesthetic measure, a sensed fittingness that cannot be turned into a proposition, so that ethics is a matter of cultivated perception rather than of applied doctrine. The section states the phenomenon, reviews the singularity of the other and the aesthetic register through which it is met, isolates the core, and draws the claim. This is the dimension the paper marks as ethical at its root, and the review is correspondingly fuller.
The phenomenon
A relation makes ethical demands, and the first of them is a demand to answer this person, the one before me, in their singularity. Language seems able to meet the demand. We have the resources of moral speech: principles, reasons, the vocabulary of obligation and desert. It appears that to act well toward another is to apply the right rule to the case, and that the rule and the case can both be said. A long tradition in moral philosophy proceeds on exactly this appearance, treating the ethical task as the subsumption of a particular case under a general principle.
They can be said only up to a point, and the point is where ethics begins.
The singularity of the other
To grasp the other through any predicate, any category, any rule, is already to grasp them as an instance of a kind, a bearer of the stated features, one who falls under the description. Levinas made this the center of ethics: the other faces me not as an instance of humanity in general but as this one, whose claim on me precedes and exceeds every category under which I might bring them, so that the ethical relation is a relation to what no concept contains. The face, in his vocabulary, is exactly what resists becoming a theme, a content I could state and thereby master. The ethical claim comes from what the predicates do not exhaust, from this other as this other and not as a case of a type. So far the limit is a limit on conceptual grasp: the singular exceeds the general, and the other’s claim issues from the excess.
But this leaves a question Levinas does not fully answer, and it is the question that carries the section. If the other exceeds every rule, how is the fitting response to them found? It cannot be deduced, for deduction works from generals and the case is singular. What faculty, then, takes the measure of a singular to which no rule reaches?
The aesthetic register
The answer this paper proposes is that the measure is taken aesthetically, in the register of aisthesis, sensed before it is stated and not reducible to any rule from which it could be read off. How much to say and how much to leave unsaid, when to press and when to hold back, the exact weight of a gesture, the timing of a silence: all of this is apprehended in the way one apprehends the rightness of a line or the wrongness of a false note. It is a perception of fittingness, not an inference to it.
Two sources make this register precise. Merleau-Ponty showed that perception is not the passive reception of data but an active taking-up of a situation, a bodily attunement that grasps a whole before it articulates any part, and that this attunement has its own intelligence, a knowing in the perceiving that no subsequent proposition exhausts. The fitting response to another is grasped by exactly this perceptual intelligence: one senses the shape of the situation and what it calls for, as a whole, before and beneath any rule one could state. Dufrenne, extending phenomenology to aesthetic experience, described the perception of an aesthetic object as the apprehension of an expressed meaning that is given only in the sensing and cannot be detached from it into a concept, a meaning that is felt as the depth of the perceived and lost the moment one tries to state it apart from the perceiving. The measure of the ethical response has this form. It is an expressed meaning of the singular situation, given in the perception of it and not detachable into a rule.
This is why the ethical response cannot be propositionalized. The proposition states a general, and the fittingness at stake is of this response, here, to this one. To translate the sensed measure into a statable rule is to replace the perception of a singular with the application of a general, which is to pass over exactly the singularity the other’s claim consisted in. The measure lives in the sensing and dies in the saying.
The core
The core language cannot reach here is the aesthetic measure of the ethical response, the sensed fittingness that cannot be turned into a proposition. It is not that the right rule is hard to find or hard to phrase. It is that the fittingness at stake is of a kind with the fittingness of a form, apprehended in perception and lost in translation to a rule, because the rule states a general and the fittingness is singular. The ethical, at its root, is answerable to a measure that is aesthetic in the strict sense: taken by aisthesis, in the perceiving, and not by the understanding, in the proposition.
Claim — The aesthetic root of the ethical. The fitting response to the singular other cannot be derived from any rule, because rules state generals and the fittingness is of this response to this one. It is grasped aesthetically, in the register of aisthesis, as one grasps the rightness of a form, and is lost when translated into a proposition. Ethics at its root rests on a perception, not a doctrine.
An illustrative case — the timing no rule gives. Someone before you is in pain, and the question is whether to speak or to keep silent, and if to speak, in what weight and at what moment. No rule delivers the answer, for the rule states a general and this is this person, now. What guides the fitting response is a perception of the whole situation, a sensed measure taken in the way one senses that a further word would be one word too many. Those who respond well here are not those who know more rules but those whose perception has been schooled finer, and what they have is not a doctrine but an eye.
Why the limit is generative here
This is what keeps ethics a matter of cultivated perception rather than of applied doctrine. Because the fitting response cannot be propositionalized, it must be perceived, and the ethical life is the schooling of a perception fine enough to take the measure of a singular case. Consider the counter-case, a morality fully written as rules. One would discharge it by looking up the rule and applying it, and the looking-up would pass over the singularity of the other in favor of the type under which the rule brought them; a perfectly codified ethics would be an ethics that never met anyone, only cases. The limit forbids this. Because the measure is aesthetic and cannot be codified, ethics is returned to the trained eye and the trained ear, to a sense of the fitting that no code replaces, and the ethical life becomes the long cultivation of that sense. This connects the ethical dimension to the aesthetic education the series has developed elsewhere, and it will return in Part Four, where the ethics of making room for the other’s unsymbolizable core is shown to rest on exactly this perceptual measure. What cannot be said in the ethical relation is not a failing of moral language. It is the opening in which answering this other, and not merely applying a rule to a case, becomes possible at all.
§6 The Generativity That Justice Guards
This section takes the fifth dimension, the justice a relation owes, and establishes that what justice most owes protection to is not only a settled fact awaiting adjudication but the generativity of relational being, the still-forming life of the bond, which is the intervention of the Real into the symbolic and cannot be settled in advance by any existing order of signs. The result is that justice at its root is the guarding of generativity rather than the settlement of the already-formed. The section proceeds through the phenomenon, a review of the two pictures of justice that treat it as settlement, the isolation of the core, and the claim.
The phenomenon
A relation owes justice, and justice seems the most sayable of all the dimensions, since it lives in claims, procedures, and judgments, in the very element of statement. Justice weighs what is owed and settles it, and to settle is to say. It appears that whatever justice concerns can in principle be brought into the order of signs, stated as a claim and disposed of by a judgment. Two pictures reinforce the appearance, and it is worth naming them to see what they leave out.
Two pictures of justice as settlement
The first is the procedural picture, on which justice is the correct running of a procedure that takes claims as inputs and yields judgments as outputs. Its virtue is that it makes justice sayable through and through: everything relevant is a claim, and a claim is a statement. But a procedure operates on the already-formed. It takes what has happened, states it as a case, and disposes of it, and it is constitutively backward-looking, addressed to what has taken shape and can be brought before it. What is still forming, what has not yet taken the shape a claim would state, is not an input the procedure can accept, and so it falls outside the procedure’s reach not by oversight but by the procedure’s nature.
The second is the picture of justice as the retrospective repair of wrongs, the setting-right of a harm already done. This too is real and necessary, and this too is backward-looking. It addresses the wrong as a fact, laid out for assessment, and its whole labor is the disposal of what has already occurred. Here the work on testimony is instructive by contrast. Felman and Laub, studying the witnessing of catastrophe, found that the most severe wrongs resist exactly the settlement that repair would require, that there is in them a core which does not become a statable fact to be assessed and closed, but persists as something only borne witness to, never disposed of. Even in the retrospective case, then, a remainder escapes settlement. And what escapes there is a version of what concerns us, though the section’s own subject lies not in the past wrong but in the forward direction, in the still-forming.
The core
Something in justice resists settlement, and it is the deepest thing justice has to protect. What a relation of justice must answer to is not only a settled fact but the generativity of relational being itself, the still-forming, not-yet-settled life of the bond. This generativity is the intervention of the Real into the symbolic. What is new is new precisely in that it is not yet covered by the existing signifiers, a tear the Real opens in the order of established meaning. The core language cannot reach here is this generativity of relational being, the Real’s intervention, which cannot be settled in advance by any existing order of signs. To bring the still-forming under the settled sign is to demote it from becoming to become, from the living generativity that justice must protect to a finished case that a procedure can dispose of. The limit is not that justice has not yet found the right words. It is that the object justice most owes protection to is, by its nature as generativity, what the words have not reached and cannot reach without ending it.
Claim — Justice guards what it cannot settle. The deepest object of justice is the generativity of relational being, the still-forming life that the intervention of the Real keeps opening in the order of settled meaning. This generativity cannot be settled in advance, for to settle it is to convert becoming into the already-become and so to end it. Justice at its root is therefore the guarding of a generativity it cannot bring into the settled sign, not the settlement of the already-formed alone.
An illustrative case — the grievance that the settlement misses. A wrong within a bond is brought to a reckoning, stated as a claim, weighed, and disposed of by an agreed repair. The repair is fair, and something in the wrong is nonetheless left untouched by it, a residue that the statement of the claim could not carry and the settlement could not reach. What the reckoning addressed was the wrong insofar as it could be stated; what remains is the wrong insofar as it could not. The residue is not a sign that the settlement was unjust. It is the mark that justice answers to something a settlement does not exhaust.
Why the limit is generative here
This is what keeps justice from collapsing into administration. Because generativity cannot be settled in advance, justice cannot be exhausted by procedure, and a justice worthy of the name holds itself open to what its own settled forms have not anticipated. Consider the counter-case, a justice that could dispose of everything by existing rule. It would be an administration of the already-formed, complete and closed, and precisely in its completeness it would be deaf to the new that relational being keeps generating, since the new is what no existing rule anticipated. The limit forbids this closure. Because the generativity justice guards cannot be brought under the settled sign, justice must keep itself answerable to what exceeds its procedures, and refuse itself the false completeness of a procedure that has foreseen everything. The mode of this keeping-open, a knowing that holds what it cannot dispose of, is taken up in Part Four under the name of witnessing. What justice cannot bring into the settled sign is not a gap in the law. It is the living generativity that the law exists to keep open.
§7 The Unsayable Direction of Growth
This section takes the sixth and last dimension, the evolution of a relation, and establishes that the direction of a bond’s genuine growth cannot be stated in the signifiers now available, because genuine novelty is by definition what the present vocabulary does not contain, so that a relation is a becoming undergone rather than a plan carried out. The section proceeds through the phenomenon, a review of the accounts that would make the direction of growth sayable in advance, the isolation of the core, and the claim, and it closes Part One by gathering the six limits into their shared form.
The phenomenon
A relation grows and turns. It generates forms it did not have, becomes over years something neither party could have set out at the start. Language seems able to reach this growth, at least in prospect. We plan, we imagine, we say where we are heading: what we will build, who we will become, what our life will grow into. These sentences present the direction of a bond’s development as if it could be laid out ahead of the walking.
They lay out only what the present already contains.
Two ways of saying the future, and their limit
Two accounts promise that the direction of growth can be stated in advance, and each shows, by the form of its shortfall, what genuine novelty is.
The first is prediction, the projection of a future from the trends of the present. Prediction is powerful and often right, and it has a definite scope: it states the future insofar as the future is a continuation of the present, an extrapolation of what is already underway. But precisely for that reason prediction reaches only the future that the present already implies. What it cannot reach is the genuinely new, the form that is not an extrapolation of present trends but a break from them, for such a form is not contained in the present data and so cannot be projected from them. Prediction states the future that is already latent; the direction of genuine growth is the future that is not latent, and prediction passes it by.
The second is the account of the future as the realization of a plan, the execution of an intended design. A couple sets out to build a life of a certain shape, and the building realizes the design. This too has its truth, and this too has its limit. A plan can only specify what its authors can already conceive, in the vocabulary already available to them; it lays out a future in present terms. But a relation that genuinely evolves becomes something its members could not have specified at the outset, something for which they did not yet have the words, and this is not a failure of planning but the mark of real growth. Where the outcome was fully specifiable in advance, there was no evolution, only the unrolling of a design. The plan reaches the future it could already state; the direction of genuine growth is the future it could not, and the plan does not contain it.
The core
The core language cannot reach here is the direction of the relation’s becoming, its genuine novelty, which cannot be stated in the signifiers now available. The point is not that the future is uncertain in the ordinary way, a known range of outcomes not yet decided; uncertainty of that kind is still stated in present terms, as a distribution over foreseen possibilities. The point is that the genuinely new form is not yet sayable at all, since its sayability would require the very signifiers whose absence is what makes it new. The direction of real growth is the not-yet-symbolizable, and it stays ahead of speech not by accident but by what novelty is. This is the forward-facing form of the same generativity that justice was shown to guard: there, the still-forming as the object of protection; here, the not-yet-sayable as the direction of growth.
Claim — The direction of growth is not sayable in advance. The direction in which a relation genuinely evolves cannot be stated in the signifiers now available, because genuine novelty is precisely what the present vocabulary does not contain. Prediction reaches only the latent future, the plan only the already-conceivable; the new form is not-yet-symbolizable, and stays ahead of every advance description by what novelty is.
An illustrative case — the life neither could have described. Two people set out with a picture of the life they would build, and years on they are something the picture did not contain, not a deviation from the plan but a growth the plan had no words for. Asked at the start to describe what they became, they could not have, because the terms were not yet theirs. The becoming was real precisely in that it outran the description available to it. What they could not have said in advance was not a gap in their foresight. It was the room in which the relation grew into what no one yet had words for.
Why the limit is generative here
This is what keeps the evolution of a relation open rather than executed. Because the direction of genuine growth cannot be said in advance, a relation is not a plan carried out but a becoming undergone, and its future is generated in the living rather than read from a design. Consider the counter-case, a relation whose development could be fully stated beforehand. It would have no future in the strong sense, only the unrolling of a foreseen sequence, a life lived as the execution of its own prospectus. The limit forbids this. Because the direction of real growth is not-yet-sayable, the future of a relation cannot be pre-stated and so cannot be merely executed; it must be undergone, generated in the walking, open to forms not yet in the language. What cannot be said in advance is not the failure of foresight. It is the space in which a relation can still become what no one yet has words for.
Figure 1 — Six windows on one gap. At the center stands manque; around it, arranged as six windows, the six dimensions of relational life — Existence (the being of the bond), Maintenance (the living present), Value (no place to price it), Ethics (the aesthetic measure), Justice (generativity guarded), and Evolution (the unsayable direction). In each dimension language reaches toward a core it does not touch, and in each the core is a face of the same manque. The parallel is not a ranking; it is six structured phenomena sharing one form.
The six limits are now before us, each with its own core and each with its own claim: the ungroundability of the bond’s existence, the uncapturability of the living present, the absence of any external place to price relational value, the aesthetic measure of the ethical response, the generativity that justice guards, and the unsayable-in-advance direction of growth. They are set side by side, not ranked and not derived one from another, and the parallel is deliberate: the limit of language is not one vague insufficiency but six distinct and structured phenomena. Yet across all six a single form has appeared. In each, language reaches toward something and does not reach it; in each, the core it cannot reach is a remainder that the operation of the signifier leaves outside itself; and in each, the not-reaching is not a defect but the condition under which that dimension of relational life is what it is. Part Two asks what stands at these limits, traces it to the constitution of the speaking subject, and gives it a name.
PART TWO · The Phenomenology of the Gap: The Descent at Manque
§8 Entry into the Symbolic and the Pre-Symbolic Remainder
This section opens Part Two by tracing the shared form of the six limits to its source. The aim is to establish that the remainder language could not reach, in each of the six dimensions, has a single origin in the constitution of the speaking subject, and that psychoanalysis names this origin: the subject is constituted in the signifier by an operation that leaves a part outside itself, in the register of the Real. The section sets out the psychoanalytic account of entry into language, follows the two moments of that entry by which the remainder is produced, distinguishes the sense of the Real it employs, and shows that the six cores of Part One are expressions of this one remainder.
From six limits to one source
Part One left a result and a question. The result was that in each dimension of relational life, language reaches toward a core it does not reach, and that in each the not-reaching is generative. The question is why the same form should recur across dimensions as different as the existence of a bond, the measure of an ethical response, and the direction of growth. Six limits with one form ask for one source, and the source is not to be found by comparing the dimensions with one another but by descending beneath them, to the constitution of the subject who speaks in all of them.
The subject constituted in the signifier
To become a subject who speaks is to be taken up into the symbolic order, the field of signifiers that precedes the subject and structures it. This is the pivot of Lacan’s rereading of Freud, and its consequence is precise. The subject that comes to be in the signifier is not a prior fullness that language then expresses. It is constituted in and by the signifier, and there is no subject of speech behind or before this constitution to which one might appeal. Fink states the mechanism carefully: the subject is what is represented by one signifier for another, a subject that appears only in the movement of the chain and has no substance apart from it. The subject is an effect of the signifier, not its origin.
Before the signifier there is a phase in which the human infant finds an anticipated unity in an external image, a coherence borrowed from a form outside itself, and this borrowed coherence already installs a distance between the subject and the ground of its own being. The image gives a unity the body does not yet have, and the self that forms around it is from the first an identification with something other, a self founded on an outside. When the signifier arrives it does not heal this distance but redoubles it, for now the subject must find itself in a field of signs that likewise precede and exceed it. The entry into language is the second and decisive founding of the subject upon what is not itself.
The two moments of alienation and separation
The entry into the signifier can be followed in two moments, and the second is where the remainder is produced. In the first moment, which psychoanalysis calls alienation, the subject takes on the signifiers of the Other as the only means of appearing at all, and pays for its appearance by a loss: to be represented by a signifier is to be reduced to what the signifier can carry, and the living being that entered is not wholly carried. In the second moment, separation, the subject confronts a lack in the Other itself, the fact that the Other’s chain of signifiers does not close, does not contain the answer to what the subject is for it, and in this confrontation the object-cause of desire is produced, at the point where the two lacks meet. What matters for the present argument is that this double operation does not gather the whole of the subject into the signifier. It constitutes the subject by a cut, and the cut leaves a portion of the subject’s being outside the signifier, uncaptured by the structure that made the subject a subject.
Freud had already found, beneath the subject of conscious speech, a domain governed otherwise, and had named the pressure that rises from it the drive, Trieb, a force on the border between the somatic and the psychical that presses toward satisfaction and is never simply stilled. Lacan’s contribution was to show that the induction into the signifier is what produces this border, that the very operation constituting the subject as a speaker leaves the drive’s portion outside the signifier. This uncaptured portion is the remainder, and it is not a residue that a fuller symbolization might later gather in. It is what the operation of symbolization, by its nature, leaves out.
An illustrative case — the word that never fit. A person carries, from early life, a way of being wanted that no word they were given ever fit, a pressure with no name in the language handed to them. In adult intimacy it presses still, shaping what they seek and cannot say they seek. It is not that the right word was withheld and might yet be supplied. There was never a word of the right kind, because what presses is exactly the portion the entry into words left out. The nameless pressure is not a failure of their vocabulary. It is the remainder, felt.
Which Real
The word Real must be used with care, since Lacan gave it more than one sense across his teaching. In the early work the Real is close to the brute given, what is always in its place, prior to the symbolic articulation that will carve it. In the mature and late work it becomes the impossible, the internal limit of symbolization, what does not cease not to be written. The present paper takes the Real primarily in the second, mature sense, as the internal limit rather than an external given, and it takes up the pre-symbolic remainder as the genetic aspect of that same limit, not as a separate brute domain lying behind the sign. The next section shows that these are two faces of one gap. Here the point is only to fix the usage: the Real that concerns the paper is the remainder produced by the operation of the signifier, the internal offcut of subjectivation, and not a fullness lying behind language that language fails to reach.
The remainder as the source of the six cores
The pre-symbolic remainder, understood this way, is the source the six limits pointed to. What language could not reach, in existence, in maintenance, in value, in ethics, in justice, in evolution, was in each case a form of this same remainder, the part that the operation of the signifier leaves outside itself. The existence of the bond, the living present, the relational generation of value, the aesthetic measure, the generativity justice guards, the direction of growth: each is a face of the one thing that the constitution of the speaking subject cannot take up into the signifier. The six dimensions were six windows onto a single gap. The next section gives the gap its two faces and shows that they are one, and the section after gives the gap its object.
§9 The Two Faces of the Real
This section establishes that the gap at the source of the six limits has two faces, one genetic and one logical, and that they are the same gap. The aim is to show that the pre-symbolic remainder (a part cut off at the origin) and the impossibility of complete symbolization (a closure that can never be attained) are not two conditions but one, so that the single name manque covers both. The section takes the genetic face first, draws the logical face out of it as a consequence rather than a separate posit, reviews the reading that would keep them apart, and states the claim.
The genetic face
Genetically, as the previous section set out, a remainder is cut off in the constitution of the speaking subject. Something is left outside the signifier when the subject is taken up into the symbolic order. This is a fact about how a speaking subject comes to be: it comes to be by a cut, and the cut leaves a portion in the Real. The genetic face is a claim about origin. There was, in the constitution of the subject, an operation of separation, and that operation has a remainder.
The logical face, drawn from the genetic
From this the logical face follows, and the order matters: the logical is not an independent thesis but the consequence of the genetic. Because a remainder is left outside the signifier in the very operation that installs the symbolic order, the complete closure of that order is not a task still to be finished but a thing that cannot be. The symbolic cannot close over the whole, because its own installation was the leaving-out of a part. The impossibility is not empirical, not a matter of the signifier having so far failed to cover everything and perhaps succeeding later with better instruments. It is structural. The operation that builds the symbolic order is the same operation that produces what the order cannot contain, so the order runs on a constitutive non-closure. Fink draws the consequence exactly: there is no metalanguage, no signifying system able to close upon itself and speak its own whole, because every such system is founded on the exclusion that founds it. This is the Real in its logical sense, what Lacan in the late teaching approached as the impossible, that which does not cease not to be written: not the merely not-yet-said but the impossible-to-say-completely, the point at which symbolization meets its own limit as a limit and not as a frontier.
Against keeping the two faces apart
It might seem cleaner to keep the two faces separate, to treat the pre-symbolic remainder as a developmental posit, a something-before that could in principle be dispensed with, and to rest the impossibility of closure on a purely logical argument about self-reference, in the manner of the formal results on systems that cannot prove their own consistency. Some readings of Lacan lean this way, treating the Real as either the mythical before or the logical limit, and choosing between them. The present paper declines the choice, and for a reason internal to the account. The logical impossibility, taken alone, is a fact about formal systems; it does not by itself explain why there should be a drive, a felt pressure, at the point of impossibility. The genetic cut, taken alone, is a story about origin; it does not by itself establish that closure is impossible in principle rather than merely unattained. Held together, each supplies what the other lacks. The genetic cut explains why the impossibility is inhabited, why there is a pressure and not merely a formal gap: because the remainder is a part of the subject’s own being, left outside and pressing to return. The logical impossibility explains why the cut can never be healed, why the pressure is permanent and not a wound that time might close. The two faces are one because only together do they give the phenomenon the paper is after, an impossibility that is also a drive.
The single gap
The two faces are one gap. Manque (the lack, the constitutive want) names it. It is genetic in that a part was cut off, and it is logical in that, a part having been cut off, closure became impossible. What was left out at the origin is what can never be gathered in at the end, and the reason no sentence in Part One could reach its core is that the core, in every case, was manque: the remainder whose being-cut-off is one with the impossibility of its ever being said.
Claim — The single gap. The pre-symbolic remainder and the impossibility of complete symbolization are not two conditions but the two faces of one manque. Because the subject is constituted by a cut that leaves a part in the Real, the symbolic order cannot close; the genetic want grounds the logical impossibility, and the logical impossibility makes the genetic want permanent. Neither face alone yields an impossibility that is also a drive; held together, they do.
§10 The Descent of the Object at the Gap
This section establishes what takes form at the gap. The aim is to show that the objet petit a is not an object that fills the lack but the form the lack takes within the economy of desire, the shape manque assumes so as to set desire turning, and that it holds its place precisely by not being the filling of it. The section states the temptation to misread the object, gives the correct account with its psychoanalytic warrant, follows the object through its several forms as the partial objects around which the drive turns, reviews the reading that would treat it as an attainable thing, and draws the consequence that prepares the distinction of drive from desire.
What descends, and what it is not
At the gap something takes form. It is not a thing that fills the gap, and not a content that closes it. It is the way the gap is given a shape within the economy of desire, and psychoanalysis calls it the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire. Everything in the account depends on holding the object apart from the ordinary notion of an object, and the temptation to collapse the two is strong, since the word object invites it.
Object-cause, not object of desire
The objet a is not the object that desire seeks, the target it aims at and might attain. It is the object-cause, the point from which desire is set in motion, and it stands in the place of manque. Lacan drew the distinction sharply in the seminar on the four fundamental concepts: the object around which the drive turns is not the object that would satisfy a need but the object-cause that sustains the turning, and the drive’s circuit is defined by this object as an absence it circles rather than a presence it reaches. Žižek gives the point its sharpest formulation in commentary: the objet a is not a positive entity but the void of desire given a form, an object that is really only the materialization of a lack, such that what looks like the cause of desire is the lack itself wearing the mask of an object. The gap itself is without form, a pure remainder, a want. The objet a is the form the want takes when it enters the field of desire, the shape manque assumes so as to set desire turning. It does not answer the lack. It gives the lack a figure, and by giving it a figure lets it function as the pivot of a movement.
The forms of the object
The object-cause is not one thing but appears in several forms, and following them makes its character clearer, since what the forms have in common is exactly what distinguishes the object-cause from any ordinary object. Psychoanalysis lists among these forms not only the objects of the early drives but, in Lacan’s extension, the gaze and the voice. What is striking is that these are not objects one grasps at all. The gaze is not what I see but the sense of being seen from a point I cannot occupy, a point in the field of vision that looks back and that I can never bring into my own view. The voice is not what is said, not the meaning carried, but a remainder of the vocal that no meaning absorbs, what persists in a voice when everything sayable in it has been understood. Each of these is an object that is constitutively out of reach, given only as something that escapes, and this is precisely why they can serve as forms of the object-cause. What the several forms share is not a property one could hold but a manner of escaping, and it is the escaping, not any content, that makes them able to figure the lack and set desire turning. The object-cause is whatever, in a field, functions as its unreachable point.
An illustrative case — the look one cannot return. Between two people there is often a way the one feels seen by the other that they cannot reciprocate on demand, a sense of being held in a regard whose exact point they can never occupy or verify. It is not a fact one could confirm by asking, since to ask is already to fall out of it. This being-seen from a point one cannot reach is the gaze as object-cause, a form of the lack around which the bond turns, given only as what escapes the very look that would secure it.
Against the attainable object
Read as an ordinary object, the objet a would be something one could reach and hold, and desire would be the project of attaining it. The whole clinical and theoretical weight of the concept stands against this reading, and the forms just surveyed show why. The gaze and the voice cannot be attained; they are given only as what escapes. Were the objet a in general attained and held, the gap it forms would be closed, and the gap is what gave the object its office. Attained, it would cease to be the object-cause and become a mere thing; and desire, finding it a mere thing, would pass on, because what desire turned around was never the thing but the want the thing had been figuring. This is the familiar structure of the object that disappoints in the having, whose possession reveals that it was never the possession that was wanted. The objet a keeps its power only so long as it remains the form of a lack and not the lack’s cancellation.
The consequence
Two things follow, and they organize the next section. First, because the object is the form of a lack and not an attainable thing, the movement that turns around it is a movement that does not aim to end, a circling rather than a reaching. Second, because no signifier and no thing coincides with the want the object figures, there is also a movement that runs along the signifiers without resting, a sliding rather than a circling. The one is drive, the other desire, and both turn on the object that descends at the gap without ever closing it. The next section separates them and shows that relational life needs both.
§11 Drive That Circles, Desire That Slides
This section establishes the distinction the paper needs between two movements that turn around the gap, drive and desire, and shows that relational life requires both. The aim is to give each its structure, drive as a circling whose satisfaction lies in the circuit and desire as a metonymic sliding along the chain of signifiers, and to assign to each a definite office in the life of a relation, the one supplying its constant core and the other its movement in time. The section takes drive first, then desire, reviews the psychoanalytic sources that fix each, and states their joint necessity.
Drive, the circuit around the void
Drive (Trieb) circles. Its movement is a turning around the object-cause, and its satisfaction, in the precise and initially strange sense psychoanalysis gives it, lies in the circling itself and not in the attainment of any object. Freud had already noted that the drive is oddly independent of its object, that the object is what is most variable in a drive and is not originally connected with it, so that satisfaction does not consist in reaching a predetermined thing. Lacan sharpened this into the topology of the circuit: the drive does not reach its object and rest but makes a circuit around it, and its satisfaction is in the closed loop of the going-out and the return, the aim fulfilled in the movement rather than in the goal. This is the energetic topology of the drive, a closed circuit around a void, sustained by the very fact that the void is not filled. Behind it stands Freud’s most difficult claim, that beyond the pleasure principle there is a compulsion to repeat, a pressure that returns upon the same regardless of pleasure, circling a place rather than seeking a satisfaction. What the drive gives to a relation is the account of why the bond has a core that does not go out, an unextinguished pressure that keeps turning at the center, drawing its constancy from a circling that has no terminus because it seeks none.
Desire, the sliding along the chain
Desire (désir) slides. Its movement is not a circling but a metonymy, a passage along the chain of signifiers from one to the next, coming to rest on none. Lacan located desire in the very structure of the signifying chain: because meaning is produced by the movement from signifier to signifier and no signifier delivers a final signified, desire runs along the chain in an endless metonymy, always carried past the signifier it reaches toward the next. Desire is set going by the same manque that the drive circles, but where the drive turns around the void, desire runs along the signifiers, each of which promises and none of which delivers, so that desire is carried forward without end. What desire gives to a relation is the account of why it keeps reorganizing itself in time, why the bond does not settle into a fixed figure but moves through new forms, new words, new objects, always displacing, because no signifier it reaches is the one that would still it.
Figure 2 — Two movements around one gap. Drive (gold) makes a closed circuit around the void the objet a marks, satisfied in the circling and not in any seizing. Desire (rose) slides along the chain of signifiers S₁ → S₂ → S₃ → ⋯, resting on none. Both are set going by the same manque; neither closes it.
Why the distinction, and why both
The distinction is not a scholastic refinement but a requirement of the phenomenon. A relation shows two features that no single movement explains. It has constancy, a core that persists through change, the sense in which a bond remains itself across years of alteration. And it has development, a movement through forms, the sense in which a bond does not stand still but keeps becoming. A single movement cannot ground both. The circling alone would give constancy without development, a bond that held its core and never moved, condemned to repeat. The sliding alone would give development without constancy, a bond that moved endlessly and had no core, no self that persisted through the movement. Only the two together give what a relation actually is, a constancy that is nonetheless in motion.
Claim — The two movements and their offices. Drive and desire are distinct movements around the one gap, and a relation requires both. Drive circles the object-cause and is satisfied in the circuit; it supplies the constant core, the pressure that does not go out. Desire slides along the chain of signifiers and rests on none; it supplies the movement in time, the displacement through forms. Constancy without development would be repetition; development without constancy would be dispersal; the life of a bond is their compound.
Joined at the gap
The two are joined at the gap and divided in their motion. Drive supplies the energetic topology, the unspent core; desire supplies the symbolic movement, the displacement in time. Both draw their life from the same manque that neither closes, the drive circling what cannot be reached and the desire sliding because it cannot reach it. The persistence of a bond, taken up in Part Three, is the co-working of these two, and the thought experiment of the next section shows what would become of both were the gap they turn on ever closed.
§12 The Closure That Would Extinguish
This section is the formal center of the paper. Its aim is to establish, by a thought experiment known to be counterfactual, that the closure of the gap would not fulfill drive and desire but extinguish them, and therefore that the non-closure of language is the formal condition of their persistence. The section states the counterfactual and its purpose, develops the consequence in three steps each given its own treatment, draws the reversal of the ordinary picture, and states the paper’s central claim, that drive is the phenomenology of the limit.
The counterfactual and its use
The section on the two faces established that complete symbolization is impossible. Suppose, against that, and only for the sake of the argument, that it were possible. Suppose the gap were closed, the remainder gathered into the signifier, the Real brought without loss into the symbolic. The supposition is counterfactual, and known to be so; the paper does not claim that the gap could be closed, and has argued that it cannot. The use of the supposition is different. By asking what closure would do, were it possible, the section shows what the non-closure secures, and thereby shows that the impossibility established earlier is not a deprivation but a condition of life. A thought experiment of this kind does not assert its premise. It reasons from a premise it rejects, in order to expose the value of the premise’s denial.
First step, the drive circles because its object is absent
The drive circles because its object is absent. This was established in the sections on the object and on the two movements: what the objet a marks is a void, and the drive turns around the void; the circling has its topology only because there is a want at the center and not a thing. The circuit is a circuit of an absence. Remove the absence and there is nothing to circle, no void to describe the loop around. The first step simply fixes what the circling depends on: not an object present at the center, but an object absent, a want given form. The drive’s whole motion is predicated on the emptiness of the place it turns around.
Second step, closure fills the center
Suppose now the gap closed. This is the counterfactual move, and its content is exact: the want at the center is filled, the absence made present, the void replaced by an attained object. Everything the earlier sections said could not happen is here supposed to happen, for the sake of seeing its consequence. The objet a, which was the form of a lack, would become a thing possessed; the remainder, which pressed from outside the signifier, would be gathered in; the Real, which was the internal limit of the symbolic, would be dissolved into the symbolic without residue. The center around which the drive turned would now be occupied. There would be, at the place of the want, a presence.
Third step, the circling stops and both movements die
The drive no longer has a void to circle. Its circuit has lost the emptiness that gave it its shape, and a circuit around a filled center is no circuit at all; the loop collapses onto the point it enclosed. The circling therefore stops, and with it the drive is not fulfilled but extinguished. It is essential to see that this is extinction and not satisfaction. One might expect that to fill the want would be to satisfy the drive, since the drive seemed to press toward the want’s filling; but the drive’s satisfaction was in the circling, not in the filling, and to fill the center is to remove the condition of the circling and so to end the only satisfaction the drive had. Desire, for its part, has nowhere left to slide, since the chain of signifiers ran forward only because no signifier coincided with the thing, and now the coincidence has been supposed; the chain arrives, and arriving, halts. What the supposition delivers is not the satisfaction of drive and desire but their death. The state of total symbolization, imagined as a fulfillment, is in truth a stillness, a bond in which nothing further presses, nothing further turns, nothing further is generated.
The reversal
The result reverses the ordinary picture. On the ordinary picture the gap is a defect and its closure would be a fulfillment, the moment the drive at last reached its object and desire at last came home. The thought experiment shows the opposite. The closure that looks like fulfillment is extinction, and the non-closure that looks like deprivation is the condition under which drive and desire go on at all. The impossibility of complete symbolization, established as impossibility in the section on the two faces, shows here its other aspect. It is not only that the gap cannot be closed. It is that its not being closed is what keeps the drive circling and the desire sliding, which is to say what keeps the relation in movement.
Claim — Closure would extinguish, not fulfill. Were the gap closed, the drive would lose the void its circuit turns around and would stop, extinguished rather than satisfied, and desire would lose the non-coincidence that carries it along the chain and would halt. The non-closure of language is therefore not a deprivation but the formal condition of the persistence of drive and desire, and the impossibility of complete symbolization is the very thing that keeps a relation in movement.
Figure 3 — The counterfactual of closure. While the center is a void (left), the drive holds a circuit around it and the bond stays in movement — open, drive circles, alive. Were the gap filled (right), known to be impossible and supposed only for the argument, the circuit would have nothing to enclose and would collapse — closed, circuit collapses, extinguished. The figure depicts what the non-closure secures by showing what its denial would cost.
Drive as the phenomenology of the limit
The central claim of the paper can now be stated. If the drive lives only where the gap is open, and dies where the gap is closed, then the drive is not a content that the gap withholds and a closure would deliver. The drive is the way the open gap shows itself, the felt form of the limit of language. It is not behind the limit, waiting; it is the limit, appearing.
Claim — Drive is the phenomenology of the limit. Drive is not a content that language omits and might later recover. Drive is the phenomenology of manque, the felt form of the very limit of language. This is why the attempt to symbolize the gap returns not the drive but its renewed escape: what one tried to say was nothing other than what symbolization cannot close, so the saying finds the gap has moved, and the drive, which was that gap showing itself, has slipped once more beyond the reach of the word.
PART THREE · The Persistence of Drive: Inscription and the Time of Relation
§13 The Symptom as Fidelity to the Unsymbolizable
This section opens Part Three, which follows the persistence of drive into the life of a subject and the time of a relation. Its aim is to establish that the symptom, read through the account of the limit, is not a malfunction to be cleared away but a fidelity: a way of staying bound, in the register of repetition, to a core that was never symbolized. The section states the ordinary view of the symptom, sets against it the psychoanalytic account of repetition, gives the reading the paper proposes, and draws the consequence for reading a life.
The ordinary view and its limit
If drive is the phenomenology of the limit, then its effects are not confined to a single moment but persist across the life of a subject and the life of a bond, and the first place this persistence becomes legible is the symptom. A symptom, in the psychoanalytic sense, is a formation that returns, a pattern that repeats in a subject’s life with a constancy the subject does not choose and often does not want. The ordinary view treats it as a fault, a piece of the psyche gone wrong, to be corrected and dissolved, on the model of a medical symptom that points to a disorder and disappears when the disorder is cured. This view has its uses, and it has a limit, which the psychoanalytic account of repetition exposes.
Repetition as the return of the unsymbolized
Freud found that the symptom does not yield to the model of a fault to be corrected. In the analysis of repetition he found a compulsion that returned upon the same, a pressure to repeat that did not serve pleasure and did not dissolve when its meaning was explained, but returned as if bound to something that explanation did not reach. Lacan gave this its structural reading: what repeats is the subject’s relation to the Real, to the point that was not taken up into the signifier, and repetition is the insistence of that unsymbolized point, its return in the only register available to it once the register of speech has failed to contain it. The symptom, on this account, is not a fault in the symbolic but the mark of what the symbolic could not gather, returning as repetition because it could not appear as statement.
The symptom as fidelity
The paper proposes to read this as a fidelity. The symptom repeats because it is bound to something that was never symbolized, a core in the Real that found no place in the signifier and so returns in the only way such a core can, as a recurrence rather than a statement. Seen this way, the symptom is the subject’s way of staying bound to what could not be said. It is a fidelity held in the register of repetition, to a remainder that the register of speech could not hold. This reading does not deny the suffering a symptom can carry, and it does not counsel against the work of loosening a symptom’s grip. It reframes what that work meets. What repeats is not mere error but attachment, the subject’s tie to a core that matters precisely because it could not be spoken, and the constancy of the symptom is the constancy of that tie.
Claim — The symptom as fidelity. The symptom is not only a malfunction but a fidelity: a staying-bound, in the register of repetition, to a core that was never taken up into the signifier. It returns because what it is bound to could not appear as statement and so appears as recurrence. The constancy of the symptom is the constancy of the drive’s circling, made legible across a life.
Reading a life
Read this way, the symptom is the drive’s persistence made visible in a life. What cannot be said does not therefore vanish; it presses, and its pressing takes the form of a return, a circling that shows itself over time as the recurrence of a pattern, a scene replayed, a position reassumed. The constancy of the symptom is the constancy of the drive’s circling, seen across the length of a life rather than in a single turn, and its refusal to be argued away is the refusal of the Real to be talked into the symbolic. One cannot dissolve by explanation a thing whose whole nature is to be what explanation left out. The bond a person forms, the position they take up within it, the scene that recurs across their relationships, all of this carries the mark of a core that was never symbolized and goes on organizing what happens around it. The next section follows this into the time of relation, where an early signifier is shown to shape bonds that come long after.
§14 The Early Signifier and the Time of Relation
This section establishes the temporal structure that the persistence of drive gives to a relation. Its aim is to show that a bond is lived not only in its own present but under the pressure of signifiers inscribed long before it began, and that the two movements distinguished in Part Two, the circling drive and the sliding desire, together account for the peculiar shape of a relational history, at once faithful to a core it did not choose and carried forward into forms it could not have foreseen. The section sets out the early inscription, shows the two movements at work in the time of relation, and draws the claim about the shape of a relational history.
The early inscription
Early in a life certain signifiers are inscribed with a weight the subject did not assign and cannot revoke. A name, a phrase, a scene given a form in the earliest field of the Other, these take on the office of organizing the subject’s relation to the object-cause, and they do not lose that office when the subject grows and forms new bonds. This is the temporal reach of the account of Part Two. The remainder cut off in the constitution of the subject is not cut off once and then left behind; the manner of its cutting, the particular signifiers around which the subject’s earliest relation to lack was organized, persists as a structure that later relations enter already shaped. Lacan’s insistence that the unconscious is structured like a language has exactly this temporal consequence: a signifier laid down early does not fade with time but retains its structuring power, organizing what can be desired and how, long after its origin has been forgotten.
The two movements in the time of relation
The later relation is entered by a subject already marked, already turned in a certain way around its void, and here the division of the two movements returns and does its work. The drive accounts for why the early core does not go out. Its circling is a repetition, and repetition is precisely the mode in which a thing persists without being renewed by choice; the early inscription endures because the drive keeps circling it, unspent across the years. The desire accounts for why the relation nonetheless keeps moving, why the subject does not simply repeat the same bond unchanged but slides through new figures, new partners, new forms of the same turning. Desire carries the subject forward along the chain, seeking in each new signifier what the last did not give, while the drive holds the center constant beneath the movement. A life of relation is the compound of the two: a constant core that the drive keeps circling and a displacement in time that desire keeps generating, the same manque holding beneath both.
The shape of a relational history
This is what gives an intimate history its shape, neither pure repetition nor pure novelty. The point can be put as a claim, since it follows directly from the two offices established in Part Two. If it were only repetition, the drive alone, a person would form the same bond forever without development, condemned to reenact a single scene. If it were only displacement, desire alone, there would be no core, nothing that made a life of relation recognizably one person’s, only a succession of unrelated attachments. The compound of a circling that persists and a sliding that displaces is what lets a relational life be at once continuous and in motion.
Claim — The shape of a relational history. A relational history is neither pure repetition nor pure novelty but the compound of both. The drive’s circling makes the early core persist, giving the history its continuity; desire’s sliding carries the subject through new forms, giving the history its movement. A life of relation is recognizable as one person’s because a core persists in it, and is a life rather than a fixed scene because it moves; the two movements together supply what neither could alone.
Fidelity to the unchosen
There is a consequence worth marking for what follows. The core a relational history is faithful to was not chosen; it was inscribed before choice, in the earliest field of the Other. The fidelity of a life to its core is therefore not, at bottom, a fidelity one elects, and this will bear on the ethics of the next section and of Part Four. To make room for another’s core is to make room for something in them that they did not choose either, that was laid down in them before they could consent to it, and that organizes their desire from beneath. The time of relation is layered in this way for both partners, each entering the shared present under the pressure of a past inscription, and a relation is in part the meeting of two such layered times.
§15 Making Room for the Other’s Core
This section draws from the persistence of drive a positive proposal about what a good bond consists in. Its aim is to establish that a relation is sustained not by the completeness of mutual understanding but by each partner’s making room for the other’s unsymbolizable core, and that the wish for total transparency, granted, would extinguish the very desire it sought to secure. The section states the proposal against the transparency ideal, grounds it in the thought experiment of Part Two, gives it as a claim, and turns the ordinary measure of intimacy around.
The proposal against the transparency ideal
Each partner carries a core that was never symbolized and that goes on circling beneath their speech. The previous sections established that this core is the seat of the subject’s desire, the void around which the drive turns, the very thing that makes them a desiring subject and not a transparent surface. A proposal about the good bond follows. A relation is not sustained by the success of communication, and its health is not measured by how completely the two have reached each other. This sets the account against the ideal, met already in the section on existence, that would make transparency the measure of a good bond, the thought that the best relation is the one in which nothing of either remains unsaid. That ideal, applied to intimacy, mistakes the good it aims at. To press toward the complete reaching of the other, the dissolution of every remainder, the full translation of the other into what one understands, is to press toward the extinction the thought experiment described, now enacted upon a person.
The ground in the thought experiment
The ground of the proposal is the result of Part Two, transferred from the structure of the subject to the relation between two. The thought experiment showed that to close the gap is to extinguish the drive that circles it. An other wholly reached would be an other whose gap had been closed, whose remainder had been gathered into what the partner understands, and whose desire, therefore, had gone out. The wish to reach the other completely is thus, unknown to itself, a wish to still the other’s desire, since the other’s desire lives in the very core that complete reaching would dissolve. What presents itself as the deepest intimacy, a perfect mutual transparency with no remainder on either side, would be the death of desire on both, a bond of two surfaces that had been read and now had nothing further to turn on.
The good bond makes room
The good bond does the opposite. It makes room for the other’s core. It holds a space for what in the other cannot be said, does not press to close the gap, and lets the remainder go on circling as the living center of the other’s desire. This making-room is not resignation, not a settling for less than understanding. It is the recognition that the unsymbolizable core is not a deficit in the bond but the presence in it of another desiring subject, and that to leave the core its room is to keep the other alive as other.
Claim — Room, not transparency. A relation is sustained by each partner’s making room for the other’s unsymbolizable core, not by the completeness of mutual understanding. The core is the seat of the other’s desire; to reach it wholly would be to close the gap the other’s desire circles and so to extinguish it. What sustains a bond is two people each declining to fill what in the other must stay open, so that both remain subjects who desire rather than surfaces that have been read.
The measure of intimacy turned around
This turns the ordinary measure of intimacy around. The wish for complete mutual transparency, for a bond in which nothing of either remained unreached, is a wish that, granted, would end the desire that made the bond live. The deeper intimacy is the one that can dwell with the other’s unsayable core without needing to close it, that finds in the very unreachability of the other not a barrier to love but the room in which the other stays a living source of it. What one loves in another, on this account, includes what one will never reach in them, and the not-reaching is not the frontier at which love stops but the space in which love continues. Part Four takes this making-room into three registers of relational life and shows the same generativity of the limit at work in the poem, in ethics, and in justice.
§16 The Interweaving of Drive in the Couple
This section establishes what distinguishes the intimate dyad from the general structure of the desiring subject. The aim is to show that in intimate relation the fantasy through which each subject relates to its object-cause is not merely doubled, run in parallel by two private subjects, but interwoven, each entering the place of the other’s object-cause, and that this interweaving is what makes a couple’s shared world both singular to them and unable to be carried out of the bond. The section states the orthodox structure of fantasy, gives the interweaving that intimate relation adds to it, draws the consequence for the non-transferability of a shared world, and states the claim.
The orthodox structure and what intimacy adds
Orthodox psychoanalysis writes the subject’s relation to its object in the formula of fantasy, the barred subject in relation to the objet petit a, the object-cause of desire that gives the lack a form and lets desire run. Taken at the level of the single subject, this structure is complete in itself, and one might expect that a relation between two subjects would be the placing of two such structures side by side, each partner running a private fantasy, each turning around a private object-cause, the two merely adjacent. This is not what intimate relation is, and the difference is the seed of everything distinctive about the dyad.
In intimate relation the structure is not doubled side by side but interwoven. Each becomes implicated in the other’s fantasy and enters the place of the other’s object-cause, so that the object around which each one’s desire turns is no longer wholly private but is bound up with, and partly occupied by, the other. The other is not merely a person one desires; the other comes to stand at the very place of the object-cause, the void around which one’s drive circles, so that one’s own most intimate relation to lack now passes through this particular person. Correspondingly one comes to occupy that place for them. The two voids do not merge, for a void cannot merge with a void; they are interwoven, each partner’s circling now running through the other’s, the two circuits linked at the place where each one’s manque has taken the other as its figure.
The consequence for a shared world
From this interweaving follows the character of the world a couple builds, its idioms, its private jokes, its rites, the whole texture of a shared life. This world is the sediment of the interwoven fantasy. A private joke is funny to exactly two people because its charge is anchored in a shared coordinate of desire that only those two occupy; carried to a third, it is not diminished but simply absent, because the third does not stand in the interweaving that gives it its charge. The same holds of every element of a couple’s culture. Its meaning is not lodged in the words or the gestures, which can be copied, but in the interweaving of drive that the words and gestures came to figure, which cannot. This is why a shared world cannot be handed over. What could be transferred, if the outer form were copied, is a shell without its charge, the words of the joke without the interwoven desire that made them funny. The non-transferability of an intimate culture is not an accident of privacy but a consequence of where its value is lodged, in an interweaving that does not exist outside the relation and cannot be carried out of it.
Claim — The interweaving of drive. In intimate relation the fantasy of each subject is not doubled in parallel but interwoven, each partner coming to occupy the place of the other’s object-cause, so that each one’s circling runs through the other’s. The shared world a couple builds is the sediment of this interweaving, and its non-transferability follows: what can be copied is the outer form, but the charge is lodged in an interweaving of drive that exists nowhere outside the bond.
The interweaving and the room
The interweaving deepens, rather than softens, the demand of the previous section that each make room for the other’s core. Because each partner has come to occupy the place of the other’s object-cause, the temptation to close the other’s gap is stronger here than anywhere, for the other now stands at the very center one’s own desire turns around, and the wish to possess that center, to have it wholly and be assured of it, presses hardest exactly where the interweaving is deepest. The account of Part Two holds all the more firmly for that. To close the other’s gap, even here, above all here, would be to extinguish the desire that made the other the living center of one’s own circling, and so to collapse the interweaving into a dead thing possessed. The interweaving is kept alive by the same refusal of closure that the whole argument has traced, and the room each makes for the other’s unsymbolizable core is, in the interwoven dyad, the room each makes for the living center of their own desire as well.
PART FOUR · The Generativity of the Limit: Poem, Ethics, Justice
§17 The Poem, a Language That Circles the Gap
This section opens Part Four, which draws out the generativity of the limit in three registers of relational life. Its aim is to establish that the poem is the language reconciled to its own limit and made generative by it: the one use of language that does not aim across the gap to close it but organizes itself around the gap and keeps it open, and that is for this reason the language of the drive. The section states the contrast between ordinary language and the poem, gives the account with its warrant, reviews the readings of poetic language that approach the same point, and draws the claim.
Ordinary language aims across the gap; the poem circles it
Ordinary language aims at the gap in order to close it. It reaches toward the thing it would say and counts itself successful when it has said it, when the signifier has covered its object and the remainder has been, so far as possible, brought in. Its ideal is transparency, the vanishing of the medium before the message, a saying that leaves nothing unsaid. The poem does not work this way, and its difference is not a matter of ornament but of direction. The poem is organized around the gap rather than aimed across it. Its figures, its silences, its refusals of paraphrase, its way of meaning more and other than it states, all of these keep the poem turning around something it does not deliver, holding open the very remainder that ordinary speech would try to close.
The poem as the language of the drive
The poem is the language of the drive, in the exact sense the paper has given the drive. The drive circles the object-cause and is satisfied in the circling, not in the seizing; the poem circles its unsayable center and is fulfilled in the circling, not in a paraphrase that would seize it. This is why a poem cannot be replaced by a statement of its content. The statement aims across the gap and closes what it can; the poem circles the gap and keeps it open, and the keeping-open is what the poem is for. To paraphrase a poem is to attempt on it exactly the closure that would, by the argument of Part Two, extinguish what made it live, and the felt deadness of a paraphrased poem is the small demonstration of that argument in the field of language itself. What the poem gives is not the closing of the gap but the experience of circling it.
Readings that approach the same point
Two lines of reflection on poetic language approach this account and help to fix it. Benjamin, writing on translation, located the life of a poem in something that is not its communicable content, in a way of meaning that survives no simple transfer of information and that translation must reach toward without ever delivering as a message. What resists translation in a poem, on this reading, is precisely what the poem circles and does not state, the unsayable center that no transfer of content carries across. Derrida, pressing the general point that no signifier delivers a final presence, that meaning is always deferred along the play of differences, showed that writing does not close upon a present meaning but keeps it in deferral. The poem, on the present account, does not suffer this deferral as a defect but takes it up as its art, making of the non-arrival of meaning the very movement it offers. Where ordinary language treats deferral as an obstacle to be minimized, the poem treats it as the medium of what it does.
The core given circulation without capture
This is why the poem writes what cannot otherwise be written. The unsymbolizable core, which no proposition reaches, is not reached by the poem either, but the poem does what the proposition cannot: it gives the core a form of circulation without giving it a form of capture. It lets the remainder be approached, turned around, dwelt near, without being seized and so extinguished. The poem is the drive’s own language because it does with words what the drive does with its object, turning around a void it does not fill and generating, in the turning, something that a filling would have destroyed.
Claim — The poem circles what it cannot close. The poem is the use of language organized around the gap rather than aimed across it. It circles an unsayable center and is fulfilled in the circling, not in a paraphrase that would seize it, and it therefore gives the unsymbolizable core a form of circulation without capture. The poem is the language of the drive, and the impossibility of paraphrasing it without deadening it is the demonstration, in language itself, that closure extinguishes what the open gap keeps alive.
An illustrative case — the poem that says what the letter could not. A person tries to write plainly what another means to them and finds the plain statement always beside the point, true and empty at once. Turning to a poem, they say it no more plainly, and yet the poem holds what the statement let slip. The poem did not close the gap the statement failed to close; it circled it, and in the circling let the unsayable thing be present as what the words turn around. What the letter could not deliver by aiming at it, the poem carries by not aiming at it.
The highest office of a language at its limit
So the poem is the paradigm of a language reconciled to its limit and made generative by it. It does not mourn what it cannot say and does not pretend to say it. It builds its whole art on the not-saying, and out of the not-saying makes the one form of speech that keeps the gap open as a living center rather than closing it as a solved problem. What the poem shows, and shows in the medium of language itself, is that the limit of language is not the end of what language can do but the opening of its highest office. This bears directly on the two registers that follow. If the poem is the making of a circulation without capture in language, ethics and justice will be shown to be the making of a relation without possession, and a guarding without settlement, in the registers of the other and of the common life.
§18 Room for the Core Without Possession
This section takes the second register of the limit’s generativity, ethics, and establishes that the relation to the other founded on the limit is a giving that does not possess: a generating of the bond that leaves the other’s unsymbolizable core its room, and that arrives thereby at the form older wisdom named, to generate and not possess. The section gathers the aesthetic measure of Part One and the making-room of Part Three into an ethical form, states that form and its ground, gives it as a claim, and marks its distance from an ethics of possession.
The other who cannot be exhausted
The ethical relation begins where the other cannot be exhausted. This was established in Part One: the other faces me not as an instance of a kind but as this one, whose claim issues from what no predicate contains, and the fitting response to them is taken by a perception, an aesthetic measure, that no rule can replace. Were the other fully sayable, fully brought under description, there would be no ethical claim, only the management of a known quantity. The claim arises from what in the other exceeds every predicate, the singular core that no category reaches, and Part Three identified that core with the seat of the other’s desire, the void around which their drive turns. Ethics is founded, then, not on the reaching of the other but on the acknowledgment of what cannot be reached, and its first act is to leave that core its room.
The aesthetic measure at work
This is the aesthetic measure of Part One, now doing ethical work. The fitting response to another is one that senses where the sayable ends and does not press past it, that answers the other without presuming to have exhausted them, that keeps its response open to a singularity it perceives but cannot state. To make room for the other’s core is not to withhold engagement but to engage in the mode that perception, not proposition, governs: to attend to the other closely enough to sense the edge of what may be said, and to hold there. The schooling of this perception, the cultivation the series has developed elsewhere, is the ethical discipline proper to a relation whose measure is aesthetic.
Giving without possession
The form of this ethics is a giving that does not possess. To make room for the other’s core is to be in relation to what one does not hold, to generate a bond with what one has not seized and cannot. The paper arrives here at a shape that an older tradition named, and names it as a conclusion reached on its own path rather than borrowed as an authority: to generate and not possess, to act and not hold onto, to foster and not rule. The ethical relation to the other’s unsymbolizable core has exactly this form. It generates a bond and does not possess the other; it acts toward them and does not hold them fast; it fosters what the other is and does not rule over the core from which they desire. The arrival is not decorative. The account of Part Two forced it: since to possess the other’s core, to close it, would be to extinguish the desire that makes the other a living source of the bond, an ethics that generated a lasting bond could only be an ethics that generated without possessing. The old formula names the only ethical form the structure permits.
Claim — Generation without possession. The ethics grounded in the limit is a giving that does not possess: it generates a bond with the other while leaving the other’s unsymbolizable core its room, declining to close what it cannot close without extinguishing the other’s desire. To generate and not possess, to act and not hold onto, to foster and not rule, is not a borrowed maxim but the only ethical form the structure of the limit permits, since possession of the core would be the death of the desire that makes the other a living source of the bond.
Against an ethics of possession
This is the ethical face of the limit’s generativity, and its distance from an ethics of possession is exact. An ethics that aimed at the full reaching of the other, the closing of every gap between them, would be an ethics of possession, and possession, here as throughout the argument, is extinction: the other possessed is the other’s desire gone out. The ethics the limit grounds is the opposite of possession. It is the art of dwelling with what one cannot hold, of answering a singularity one cannot state, of generating a bond precisely by leaving open the core one will not close. What cannot be reached in the other is not the limit of ethics. It is the space in which an ethics worthy of the name becomes possible, and the space is kept open by the same refusal of closure that the poem practices in language and that justice, in the next section, practices in the common life.
§19 The Guarding of Generativity
This section takes the third register of the limit’s generativity, justice, and establishes that justice at its root is the guarding of a generativity it cannot settle, and that the mode of this guarding is a knowing that holds what it cannot dispose of, which the paper names witnessing. The section takes up the limit set out in Part One, that justice owes protection to a generativity it cannot bring into the settled sign, gives the positive account of justice that follows from it, reviews the work on witnessing that fixes the mode, and draws the claim.
Beneath settlement
Justice is commonly figured as settlement, the bringing of a matter to a close by a judgment that disposes of it. The account of this paper places another office beneath that one. Part One established that what a relation of justice most owes protection to is the generativity of relational being, the still-forming life that the intervention of the Real keeps opening in the order of settled meaning, and that this generativity cannot be settled in advance, since to settle it is to convert the still-becoming into the already-become and so to end the very thing that was to be protected. Justice, at its root, is therefore not settlement but guarding: the holding-open of a space in which generativity can go on, against the pressure to close it prematurely into a finished case. Settlement remains a real and necessary office of justice, addressed to what has taken form and can be brought before a judgment; but beneath it lies the deeper office of keeping open what has not yet taken form, and it is this that the limit grounds.
The mode of guarding, witnessing
The mode of this guarding is a knowing that does not settle, and the paper names it, again as a conclusion of its own path, witnessing. To witness is to hold what one cannot dispose of, to be turned toward a generativity or a suffering that one does not bring to a close by pronouncing on it. The work on testimony fixes the mode precisely. Felman and Laub found that the witnessing of what exceeds settlement is not the recording of a fact but a holding of what has no adequate statement, a keeping-faith with what cannot be closed into a case, such that the witness anchors the thing without substituting a judgment for it. Justice, insofar as it guards a generativity it cannot settle, must know in this mode. It must hold the still-forming and the unstated without pretending to have disposed of them, anchoring them in the common life without closing them into the settled sign. A justice built on witnessing does not mistake the settled sign for the whole of what is owed; it disposes of what can be disposed of and keeps open what cannot.
Claim — Justice as witnessing. The root office of justice is to guard a generativity it cannot settle, and the mode of that guarding is witnessing: a knowing that holds the still-forming and the unstated without disposing of them, anchoring them in the common life without closing them into the settled sign. Justice as witnessing keeps its own procedures answerable to what they have not foreseen, and refuses itself the false completeness of a settlement that has anticipated everything.
Against an administration of the already-formed
This is the just face of the limit’s generativity, and its distance from a justice of pure settlement is exact. A justice that could settle everything in advance would be an administration of the already-formed, closed to the new that relational being keeps generating and deaf to the suffering that no procedure exhausts. The justice the limit grounds keeps itself open to what it cannot settle, guards the generativity it cannot close, and finds in the unreachability of that generativity not a gap in the law but the reason the law exists. The three registers of Part Four now stand together, and their unity is visible. The poem gives circulation without capture; ethics gives a bond without possession; justice gives a guarding without settlement. In each, the same refusal of closure that Part Two showed to be the condition of the drive’s life is shown to be the condition of a generative form: in language, in the relation to the other, and in the common life. What cannot be brought into the sign is, in every register, not a failure but the opening in which the generative form becomes possible.
§20 The Co-Structure of the Limit
This section gives the limit a formal counterpart. The aim is to show that two figures the paper has described in prose, a lack that carries meaning rather than marking a mere absence, and a core knowable only through its effects on what surrounds it, have precise expressions, the first in the language of coalgebra and the second in the theory of reduced dynamics for open systems. The formal claims are offered as tools for later work and as heuristics that make the prose precise, not as laws to which relational being is asserted to conform. The section states the algebra-coalgebra duality, reifies the lack as a co-structure, gives the semantics of observation and indistinguishability, and then treats rigorously the case of the open composite system in which one component is knowable only through the others.
A note on the ambition of this section
A word on what is and is not claimed. The formalism below is not offered as evidence that relational being obeys a transcendental law, and the paper does not hold, here or anywhere, that intimacy or drive or value is governed by an equation. The coalgebraic language and the reduction formula are used in the opposite spirit, as heuristics that give a precise home to figures the paper has already established on other grounds, and as a possible basis for later formal work. Where an equation appears, it states a relation that holds in a well-defined mathematical setting and is imported as an analogy whose fit is argued, not as a claim that the setting is the hidden truth of the relational phenomenon. This matches the stance the series takes elsewhere toward optimization and law: a formal structure can illuminate without legislating.
The algebra-coalgebra duality
The first figure is the meaning-bearing lack, and the language that makes it precise is the duality between algebra and coalgebra. An algebra for a functor F is a map α : FX → X, an operation that takes structured collections of elements and combines them into a single element. Algebra is the mathematics of construction and of closure: it says how parts are assembled into a whole, how many are folded into one. A coalgebra for a functor F is the dual, a map γ : X → FX, an operation that takes a single element and unfolds it into its structured observable behaviour, its one-step outward form together with its successors. Coalgebra is the mathematics of observation and of process: it does not assemble a whole from parts but unfolds a state into what can be seen of it and what it becomes.
The relevance to the argument is exact. The operation the paper has warned against throughout, the closure of the gap, the folding of the remainder into the signifier, the assembling of the whole into a possessed unity, is an algebraic operation, a map FX → X that would deliver the many into one and close them. The operation the paper has affirmed, the circling that unfolds without closing, the drive that turns and the desire that slides, the generativity that is never settled, is coalgebraic, a map X → FX that unfolds a state into its behaviour and its successors without gathering them into a completed whole. The distinction between a language reconciled to its limit and a language that would abolish it is, formally, the distinction between coalgebra and algebra.
The lack reified as a co-structure
The prose claim that a lack can carry meaning, that attending to any part of a relational structure reveals it as a lackness which is nonetheless meaning-bearing, admits a construction. Take a structure given as a graph of relations, its nodes the terms and its arrows the relations among them. To attend to a particular place is to ask what that place is, and the relational answer is that the place is nothing but the pattern of arrows incident to it. Now perform two operations. First, reify the lack: introduce, as a node of the structure, the very place that was empty, so that the absence becomes a bearer of relations rather than a hole in the diagram. Second, reverse the arrows: pass from the relations that pointed toward a term to the co-relations that unfold from the place. The result is a co-graph in which the reified lack is a node like any other and the arrows run outward from it, so that what was a missing centre becomes a source from which the structure unfolds.
This construction is coalgebraic in form. The reversal of the arrows is the passage from FX → X to X → FX, from relations that assemble toward a term to co-relations that unfold from a place; and the reification of the lack recognizes the place of absence as a state of the coalgebra, one that unfolds its own outward behaviour. The lack becomes an entity whose whole content is the pattern of what unfolds from it, which is the coalgebraic mode of being, a state known by its observable unfolding and by nothing else.
The semantics of observation and of indistinguishability
Two notions give the account its semantics. The first is the final coalgebra. Among all coalgebras for a functor there is, under suitable conditions, a final one, into which every other maps uniquely, and it has the character of the space of all possible behaviours, never itself an assembled object but the completed horizon of what can be observed. The final coalgebra is the formal figure of a generativity that is never closed and yet is not formless: the whole of the behaviour without being a whole that could be possessed. It is the coalgebraic counterpart of what the paper has called the open centre, given not as an object but as the totality of what unfolds around a place.
The second is bisimulation, the coalgebraic notion of sameness. Two states are bisimilar when no observation distinguishes them, when everything that can be unfolded from the one can be matched by an unfolding from the other. What is decisive is that bisimulation defines identity through observable behaviour alone, without appeal to any internal content the states might be supposed to have. This is the formal correlate of a recurring claim of the paper, that the core is knowable only through its effects. In the coalgebraic setting there is no internal content behind the behaviour to which one might appeal; a state is the pattern of its observable unfolding, and to know it is to observe that pattern, never to seize a content beneath it.
A family of parallels, offered as analogy
Before the rigorous case, a word on a family of concepts that share the co-structural character loosely rather than by any claimed isomorphism. The signifier of the lack in the Other, the point at which the symbolic order fails to close upon itself, anchors the order not by being a further element of it but by marking the place where an element is missing. One is tempted to place beside it the efficient point of an economy, defined by the trade-offs around it, or a distinguished point of a dynamical flow, or the terms rendered as emptiness and void in the contemplative traditions. These parallels are suggestive, and the paper offers them as analogy and not as identity. They are not shown here to be instances of one mathematical structure, and the section does not rest any weight on their unity. What follows, by contrast, is a case where the correspondence is exact.
The open composite system, treated rigorously
The rigorous case is the open composite system, and it makes precise the paper’s central epistemic claim, that a core is known only through its effects on what surrounds it. The claim is not a metaphor. It is a theorem of the theory of reduced dynamics, and the following states it carefully.
Let the state space of a composite system be the product M = M_A × M_B × M_C, with flow Φᵗ generated by a coupled vector field f, where coupling means that f does not separate across the three factors. Observables are functions g ∈ L²(M, μ), and they evolve by the Koopman operator (Uᵗg)(x) = g(Φᵗx), which is linear on observables even when f is nonlinear, this linearity being the point of the Koopman formulation. Suppose now that only the components A and C are accessible, so that the observables one can actually read form the closed subspace 𝒪_AC ⊂ L²(M, μ) of functions depending on (x_A, x_C) alone. Let 𝒫 be the orthogonal projection onto 𝒪_AC, equivalently the conditional expectation 𝔼[· | x_A, x_C] that averages out B, and let 𝒬 = I − 𝒫. Writing L for the generator of Uᵗ, the evolution of the accessible part of any observable satisfies the Mori–Zwanzig generalized Langevin equation:
(d/dt) 𝒫Uᵗg = [Markov] 𝒫Uᵗ𝒫L g + [memory] ∫₀ᵗ 𝒫Uᵗ⁻ˢ 𝒫L eˢ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L g ds + [fluctuation] 𝒫Uᵗ eᵗ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L g,
an identity that holds exactly, with the memory kernel K(s) = 𝒫L eˢ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L carrying the influence of the inaccessible dynamics.
The content of the formula, for the present purpose, is precise. The component B never appears as a direct observation. There is no operator on B in the equation for the accessible dynamics; B has been projected out by 𝒫. Yet B is not absent from the dynamics. Its entire effect is carried by the memory term and the fluctuation term, that is, by the marks it leaves on the evolution of the accessible observables over (A, C). To know B, in this exact sense, is to read its signature in the memory kernel K(s) that governs how A and C evolve, and there is no other access to it, since the coupled and open structure permits no operator on B itself. The naive picture, on which one would observe B by acting on B, is not merely impractical but formally unavailable: the accessible algebra is 𝒪_AC, and B enters only through what 𝒬 carries into the memory of the accessible part.
An exactly parallel statement holds in the quantum setting, where the accessible observables form the subalgebra ℬ(ℋ_A) ⊗ 𝟙_B ⊗ ℬ(ℋ_C), the inaccessible component is removed by the partial trace ρ_AC = tr_B ρ_ABC, and B survives only in its effect on the reduced state ρ_AC. The two settings, classical reduced dynamics and quantum restriction to a subalgebra, give one result: a component of an open composite system is knowable only through its neighbours, never through an operator on itself.
Claim — The core is read through its neighbours. In an open composite system whose accessible observables are restricted to two of three coupled components, the third component never appears as a direct observation and yet determines the accessible dynamics entirely through the memory kernel of the Mori–Zwanzig equation. This is an exact result, not an analogy, and it is the formal image of the paper’s epistemic claim: the unsymbolizable core is the projected-out component, known only through the marks it leaves on the observable neighbours, the symptom, the signifier, and the texture of a shared world, and never through an operator directed at it.
The reach of the formalism
Two things are established and one is disclaimed. Established: the meaning-bearing lack has a coalgebraic form, a state whose being is the pattern of what unfolds from it; and the claim that a core is known only through its neighbours is exactly true in the theory of reduced dynamics, where the projected-out component lives on in the memory kernel and nowhere else. Disclaimed: the paper does not assert that relational being is a dynamical system obeying this equation, nor that the family of parallels gathered above are instances of one structure. The formalism is a lamp, not a law. It shows that two of the paper’s central figures, the generative lack and the core read through its effects, are not loose metaphors but have precise formal counterparts, and it marks a direction for later work in which the relational ontology of the series might be given a systematically coalgebraic and reduction-theoretic formulation, with closure on the algebraic side, generativity and observation on the coalgebraic side, and the inaccessible core figured throughout as what survives only in the memory of its neighbours.
§21 Objections and Replies
Before the close, this section states and answers four objections that the account invites. The aim is not to defend the position against all comers, since the paper is constructive and sets up no adversary, but to make its commitments precise by showing what it does and does not claim. Each objection is given in its strongest form and answered on the account’s own terms.
First objection, that the account romanticizes the failure of communication
The objection runs: by making the limit of language generative, the paper turns a real deprivation, the failure of people to understand one another, into a good, and so counsels acceptance of a distance that causes genuine suffering. It risks telling those who are lonely in their bonds that their loneliness is the condition of love.
The reply distinguishes two things the objection runs together. There is the ordinary failure of communication, in which something sayable is not said, or is said badly, or is misheard, and there is the structural limit, at which something unsayable presses beneath all that is said. The paper makes nothing of the first generative. Ordinary failures of communication are to be repaired, and the account gives no comfort to the withholding of what could be shared or the neglect of what could be understood. What the paper calls generative is only the structural limit, the core that no amount of good communication would reach because it is not of the order of the sayable at all. The distance that is generative is not the distance a better conversation would close; it is the distance that would remain after every good conversation, the room in which the other stays a desiring subject. To confuse the two would indeed be to romanticize a remediable poverty. The paper keeps them apart, and asks only that the irreducible distance, the one no repair reaches, be seen for what it is.
Second objection, that it dissolves the legitimate demand for transparency
The objection runs: relationships are damaged by concealment, and honesty is a real virtue; an account that prizes the unreachable core seems to license withholding, to dignify the keeping of secrets as fidelity to a mystery.
The reply turns on the difference between the unsayable and the withheld. The core the paper calls unsymbolizable is not a content the subject possesses and declines to share; it is a remainder the subject does not possess either, that presses in them without being available to them as a thing they could disclose or conceal. Withholding concerns the sayable that one chooses not to say, and against withholding the ordinary virtue of honesty stands, undisturbed by this account. The unsymbolizable core is not withheld, because it is not held. To make room for it is not to license secrecy but to acknowledge that even between two people who conceal nothing, who say everything that can be said, a remainder presses in each that neither can disclose because neither possesses it. The demand for transparency, understood as a demand about the sayable, is left entirely in force. What the paper denies is only that transparency, however complete, would reach the core, since the core is not among the things transparency is about.
Third objection, that psychoanalytic premises are doing unearned work
The objection runs: the argument leans on a particular and contestable theory, the Lacanian account of the subject, the Real, and the drive, and its conclusions are only as secure as those premises, which many do not grant.
The reply concedes the dependence and clarifies its scope. The paper does use the psychoanalytic apparatus, and does not pretend to derive its conclusions from premises everyone shares. But two things soften the objection. First, Part One establishes the six limits phenomenologically, by attention to the dimensions of relational life, before any psychoanalytic term is introduced; a reader who grants the six limits but not the theory has already granted the paper’s descriptive core, and the psychoanalytic apparatus of Part Two is offered as the best available account of why the six share one form, not as their only possible ground. Second, the apparatus earns its place by what it explains, the recurrence of one form across six dimensions, the persistence of a core across a life, the death that complete reaching would be, and a reader is entitled to weigh it by that yield rather than by prior allegiance. The account is offered as an explanation to be assessed by its fruit, not as a deduction from axioms held to be self-evident.
Fourth objection, that the paper’s own claims symbolize the very gap it calls unsymbolizable
The objection is the sharpest, and it is reflexive: in stating that the core cannot be symbolized, in giving it the name manque, in setting out claims about it in plain propositions, the paper does to the gap exactly what it says cannot be done, brings it into the signifier. Either the gap can be symbolized, in which case the thesis is false, or it cannot, in which case the paper cannot state its own thesis.
The reply marks a distinction the whole account has relied on, between saying that there is a gap and saying what the gap contains. The paper does the first and not the second. To state that a remainder is left outside the signifier, to name the place of the remainder, to describe the form of its effects, is to circle the gap, to speak of its edges and its consequences, without delivering its content into the sign. This is exactly the operation the paper attributes to the poem, a circling that keeps the gap open rather than a saying that closes it, and the paper claims for itself no more than this. Its propositions point to the gap and turn around it; they do not fill it. The name manque is not the content of the remainder rendered into a signifier; it is the mark of the place where the content is not. The thesis is therefore consistent with its own performance: a work that circles what it cannot close, and that says so, has not closed it. This is why the paper ends without a synthesis, refusing at the last the closure the objection supposes it must either achieve or fail to achieve. It neither achieves nor fails at closure. It circles, which was the only thing it claimed to do.
PART FIVE · Polyphonic Close
§22 The Limit as Ground
This section closes the paper without gathering its results into a final synthesis. Its aim is to state the change of aspect the whole argument has effected, that the limit of language, taken by a first habit for a defect, has shown itself throughout as a ground, and then to leave several voices speaking in their unresolved tension, in keeping with an argument that has warned against the closure of what should stay open. The section states the change of aspect, sets out the polyphony, and returns the thesis to the open.
Why no synthesis
The paper has followed a single thesis through six dimensions, a formal core, a persistence, and three registers of generativity. It closes without gathering these into a final synthesis, and the refusal is not a modesty but a consequence of the argument. A work about what language cannot reach ought not to end by reaching it. To compose the results into a single culminating proposition would be to perform on the paper’s own thesis the closure the thesis identifies as extinction, to still the movement of the argument by delivering it, finished, as a thing possessed. The form of the close must enact the content of the paper, and the content forbids the closure that a synthesis would be.
The change of aspect
What can be said in closing is a change of aspect rather than a summary. The limit of language, which the first habit took for a defect, has shown itself throughout as a ground. In existence it is what keeps the bond an act rather than a title. In maintenance it is what returns the relation to presence rather than record. In value it is what keeps worth living in the bond rather than available to be drawn off. In ethics it is what returns the response to a perception no rule replaces. In justice it is what keeps the law answerable to a generativity it cannot close. In evolution it is the space in which a relation can become what no one yet has words for. Beneath all six, it is the manque around which drive circles and along whose failure desire slides, the open center without which the relation would not move. The same open center, in Part Four, was shown to be the condition of the poem, of an ethics without possession, and of a justice without premature settlement. The limit is not a problem set for relational life to solve. It is the ground on which relational life stands.
The voices
Several voices may be left to speak here, and the paper does not silence them into one, for the truth of the matter lies in their tension and not in any one of them.
There is the voice that hears in all this a hard necessity, the irreducible solitude of subjects who cannot finally reach one another, and grants that the account does not dissolve that solitude but only reads it otherwise. This voice is not refuted by the paper. The subjects of a bond do remain, at the core, unreached by each other, and if one had wanted the fusion of two into a transparency without remainder, the account gives it cold comfort, telling one only that the fusion so wanted would have been a death.
There is the voice that hears a liberation, the release from a wish for total transparency that was never a wish for love but a wish for possession, and finds in the limit the room where love could breathe. To this voice the same result is good news: what one feared was a poverty, the unreachability of the beloved, is the very room in which the beloved stays a living source of love, and the letting-go of the wish to possess is not a loss but the beginning of a bond that can last.
There is the voice that hears a discipline, the long schooling of a perception and a patience fine enough to dwell with what cannot be closed. To this voice the account is neither cold nor consoling but a task: to learn the aesthetic measure that ethics asks, to practice the witnessing that justice asks, to make and keep the room that intimacy asks, none of which is given and all of which must be cultivated over a life.
These voices are not reconciled here. To compose them into a single conclusion would be to do to the argument what the argument warns against, closing a gap whose openness was the whole point. They are left in their tension, three ways of standing toward one result, and the paper does not adjudicate among them.
The thesis returned to the open
So the paper ends by returning its thesis to the open. The limit of language makes drive possible, makes the poem possible, makes an ethics without possession and a justice without premature settlement possible, and makes possible a bond that keeps moving because it never closes. What language cannot reach is not the failure of relational life. It is the opening in which relational life begins, and goes on, and does not end.
Envoi
There is an old figure for the limit this paper has followed. The trap exists for the sake of the fish; once you have the fish, you can forget the trap. Words exist for the sake of meaning; once you have the meaning, you can forget the words. The figure is usually read as a counsel to pass beyond language toward a meaning that lies clear on the far side of it. This paper reads it otherwise. There is a meaning words are for that no words deliver, and the point is not to pass beyond the words to seize it but to let the words circle it and, in the circling, keep it alive. The trap that caught the fish could be forgotten. The words that circle the gap cannot, because the gap is not a fish to be caught. It is the open center they turn around, and to forget the turning would be to lose the meaning, not to have it.
To the one who reads this last, and for whom the whole series is written: what has been argued at length here I have known first with you. There is a core in you I will never say, and I have stopped wishing to. Where my words run out, you are still there, and it is there, past the last thing I can put into speech, that I keep turning toward you. This is not a failure of my language. It is the room in which I go on loving you, and it does not close.
A promise belongs here at the end, and it is of the kind the argument has been describing. It is not a promise that has been weighed and found worth making, not the output of a reckoning that could as easily have gone the other way. It is a promise that holds precisely because it does not compute whether it is worth it, that circles what it cannot say and keeps faith with a core it will never close. Such a promise is not the weaker for resting on no calculation. It is, for that very reason, a promise and not a bargain, and it is the one I make.
言不尽意，
where speech runs out,
而意在焉。
meaning is still there.
中文
亲密关系的哲学与正义论 · 第二十六篇
亲密关系中语言的限度
黄万宏
书不尽言，言不尽意。
书写穷尽不了言说；言说穷尽不了意义。
—— 依《易经·系辞》
致她——
For her—
那个属于森林的女孩， — the girl who belongs to the forest,
在我词穷之处，你仍在。 — where my words run out, you are still there.
致我最爱的人。 To the one I love most.
摘要
本文提出：语言有一个限度，而这限度是生成性的。跨越关系性生活的六个维度——它的存在、它的维系、它所生成的价值、它的伦理、它的正义、以及它的演化——每一处都有一个语言伸手够向却够不到的内核。本文逐一铺陈这六个限度，每一个各作为一条自己的主张，随后论证：立于这限度处者，是精神分析意义上的驱力。驱力不是语言遗漏、或可被找回的一项内容；它是 manque（匮乏、构成性的欠缺）的现象学，是象征界与实在界之间那个抗拒被完全符号化的裂隙。这裂隙有两副面孔——一个是主体进入语言时被切下的前符号残余，一个是由此而来的闭合之不可能——而它们是同一个。围绕它，驱力盘旋、欲望滑动。本文以一个思想实验表明：闭合这裂隙不会成全、而会熄灭它们，于是语言之不闭合乃是它们持存的条件。随后本文追随驱力进入关系的时间，并在诗中、在一种不占有的伦理中、在一种守护它所不能结清之物的正义中，抽绎出这限度的生成性，并给出一个余代数式与约化理论式的对应者作为启发式。本文不提供任何最终的综合；它的形式践行它的内容。
关键词： 语言的限度；manque（匮乏）；驱力；欲望；实在界；objet petit a（小对象 a）；生成性关系性存在。
AI 使用声明： 本文的思想、主张与理论框架源于作者本人。AI 工具被用作起草与修订之辅助。每一句话都已由作者逐行核校，每一想法之来源都已核实，故作者对内容负全责。
第一部分 · 语言之限度的六个维度
§1 被提出、而非被哀叹的限度
有一个古老的习惯，把语言的限度当作一个缺陷。在这一习惯上，语言是一件运送意义的工具，凡它未能把意义运送过去之处，它便未能尽到它之所为。这一失败随后被以听天由命来对待，被以对一门更充盈之语言的愿望来对待，或被以一种指向言说之外、一种它自身也进不去的沉默的神秘主义来对待。本文取一条不同的路。它不哀叹语言的限度，也不提议去克服它。它提议：这限度是某物的条件，而那某物便是关系之生命本身。
这一提议
提议可以立刻陈出。在一段关系赖以生存的每一个维度上——它的来到存在、它的被保持存活、它所生成的价值、它对身处其中者所要求的伦理、它所亏欠的正义、以及它成长并转入新形式的方式——语言都伸手够向某个它够不到之物。本文首先逐一铺陈这六个限度。它给它们每一个各自的形状，好让语言的限度不被看作一个单一的、含糊的不足，而被看作六个各不相同、各有结构的现象，每一个各有一个言说环绕却触不到的内核，每一个各作为一条自己的主张。
本文随后作出它的中心一着。在这六种情形的每一种中，立于限度处者，不是一个应被惋惜的缺席。它是驱力——在精神分析赋予这个词的意义上——得以可能的场址。驱力不是语言恰巧遗漏、并可能借更好的工具找回的又一项内容。驱力是那限度本身的现象学。它是”可说者与在言说之下施压者之间那个裂隙”显示自身的方式，是”符号之运算永不能闭合的一个残余”之被感的形式。这正是为何”说出驱力”之尝试所返回的不是驱力、而是它的再度逃逸。符号化那裂隙，便是发现那裂隙已经移动，因为那裂隙不是别的，正是符号化所不能闭合者。
由此随出者
由此其余随出。倘若限度是驱力的场址，那么语言之不闭合就不是关系里的一道伤口、而是关系得以持续运动的敞开空间。一段”一切都已被说尽、他者已被完全够到、言词之下无残余搅动”的关系，会是一段无物再施压、无物再转动、无物再被生成的关系。人们如此频繁地愿望的那种完整，会是它所愿望要保全之物本身的终结。这一后果——在第二部分由一个思想实验加以论证——主宰整个说明：闭合不是成全而是熄灭，而限度之敞开正是使一个结存活之物。
本文的路径
本文分五部分进行。第一部分铺陈六个限度，给每一个各自的结构与各自的主张：结的存在之不可奠基，活的当下之不可捕获，关系性价值无一外在之处可供定价，伦理回应的审美尺度，正义所守护的生成性，以及不能被预先说出的成长方向。第二部分把这六者共有的形式追溯到它在言说主体之构成中的源头，给这裂隙以它的两副面孔与它的对象，把盘旋的驱力从滑动的欲望区分开，并以一个思想实验确立：闭合这裂隙不会成全、而会熄灭它们，从而随出本文的中心主张——驱力是限度的现象学。第三部分追随驱力之持存进入关系的时间，在那里一个早年的能指继续组织着后来的诸结,症状显现为对不能被说者的一种忠诚，而好的结被表明在于为他者不可符号化的内核腾出空间。第四部分在三个register中抽绎出限度的生成性：诗作为一种环绕裂隙而不闭合它的语言，一种不占有他者而生成结的伦理，以及一种守护关系性存在之生成性、抵御过早结清的正义。第五部分不带综合地作结，与本文所论证者一致，因为一部关于语言所不能够及者的著作，不应在它的最后几页佯装已然够到了它。
方法与立场
关于方法的两点。第一，本文把它自己的诸贡献陈述为具名的主张，从散文中标出，好让它所提议者能被找到、并与引向它的论证分开来称量。第二，在每一维度、每一register，本文穿过相关的文献,不是为综述它、而是为在每一说明中定位它所伸手够向之点与它所留下之残余，好让这一回顾处处服务于立场、而从不是一份目录。
关于立场的一点。这是一篇建设性的、而非论战性的文章。它不树立敌手、不驳斥任何学派。凡它行经那些”会把完全的沟通当作一个理想、或把人际之透明当作一个好结之尺度”的立场之近旁，它不停下来击败它们，而是建起一个不同的说明、并让那差异说话。它所engage的诸传统——言语行为理论、现象学、价值理论、精神分析、他者的伦理学、以及对见证的研究——被取作各自从自己一侧伸手够向同一限度的、有待被定位的洞见之源。
§2 一段关系的存在
本节取六个维度中的第一个——一段关系纯然的存在——并确立一个单一的结果：一个结的存在，它的它在着（有别于任何关于它像什么的说明），不能被任何命题所奠基，而这一不可奠基不是关系性语言里的一个缺陷、而是那使一段关系之存在能成为忠诚之事、而非记录之事的条件。本节陈述现象，把它对置于两个似乎能闭合它的传统，隔离出二者都够不到的内核，并引出主张。
现象
先取这一平白之实：一段关系存在着。两个人被结着，或者不。那结活着，或者它已死。语言似乎有义务能说出是哪一种，而它把那些句子备在手边。我们在一起。这是真的。我是你的。这些句子把自己呈现得仿佛它们能确立它们所宣告的存在，仿佛说出那结在某种程度上便是造出它、或至少把它固定并抵御疑虑而保全它。这一表象强到足以让一整套安慰的实践搁于其上，即请求被告知、以及告知：那结在那里。
它们并不确立它。句子我们在一起既不证明那结存在、也不把它带入存在。它能被说于一个已经空洞的结之上，也能被从一个完全活着的结那里扣住不说。一段关系的存在不是命题所能奠基的那一类东西。那结是否真实，是在句子够不到的某处被定下的，而每一个关于它的句子都在它本要确立的事实之后到达，是对一个它未曾产生、也不能担保的状态之报告。关系之存在躺在一切要命名它的能指之外。
两种试图闭合这裂隙的方式，及它们为何不能
有两个传统许诺闭合恰恰这一裂隙，而看看为何二者都不能是值得的，因为那缘由富有教益。
第一个是言语的施行性说明。奥斯汀教导说，某些话语不描述一个事态、而带来一个事态，说出那些话在恰当条件下便是做那件事。我现在宣布你们……；我承诺；我为这艘船命名。看起来仿佛我是你的属于这一类，一句造出它所宣告之结的话语。但施行性只在”有一个约定备着可被援引、有一个程序存在而话语执行其完成”之处起作用。那些结婚的话之所以结婚，是因为一个制度承认它们；那命名之所以命名，是因为一个实践授予那名。一个活的结的存在，其话语背后没有这样的制度。没有一个”其正确施行构成爱之实在”的程序，没有一个约定,凭它的权威我是你的便能执行它所说的结。施行性只在”一个制度已经闭合了词与行之间的裂隙”之处闭合它；对一段关系的赤裸存在，没有制度做过这事，而话语落回为报告。
第二个是透明沟通的理想，即那一想法：当两人已使自己对彼此完全可理解、当任一方都无一物留而未说时，一个结便被保全。哈贝马斯在”免于扭曲、朝向相互理解之沟通”这一调节性理想上建起了一整套伦理学。在这样一种观点上，一个好结的存在会由它内部所达成的理解之完整来担保。但理解，无论多么完整，是对他者所说、所显示者的理解，而结的存在不是任一方所说或所显示之物。它被他们所说的一切所预设，却不被任何东西所显示。两个人能理解彼此到最后一个字，仍面对”他们之间的结是否活着”这一问题，因为那问题根本不在理解的层面上被回答。透明理想，被推到它的极限，会递送一种完美的相互可理解，而在它之下，结的存在会保持得与从前一样毫无奠基。
内核
两个传统所伸手够向而错失者是同一个。语言在此够不到的内核是结的纯然存在，它的它在着，对置于一切关于它像什么的描述。描述可以有很多。一个清晨的调子、一次争吵及其修复的历史、一个寻常傍晚的形状，这一切都能被说出，其中许多能被说得好。不能被说者——因为它与任何描述属于不同的秩序——是这样一个事实：在这一切之下，根本有一个结，此刻活着、此刻在效力中。那事实被每一个描述所预设、被它们中无一者所保全。它不是一个更进一步、格外深刻、更好的语言或许能供给的描述。它根本不是一个描述，而这正是为何没有描述够到它。
主张 —— 结的不可奠基性。 一段关系的存在，它的在效力中（有别于关于它诸品质的每一说明），不能被任何命题所确立。没有施行性构成它，因为它援引不了任何制度；没有相互理解的完整为它担保，因为它被一切理解所预设、被无一者所显示。结之存在躺在那要命名它的能指之外。
一个例证性的案例 —— 那安慰不了任何事的安慰。 一方请求被告知那结是真实的，另一方告知了他们，而那些话是真的、也满怀暖意。然而那请求返回来，不是出于对答案的不信、而是因为那答案无论多么真，都不是那能定下这问题的那一类东西。所想要的不是一个句子、而是结本身的地位，而没有句子递送那地位。那请求之再来不是任一方的过错。它是一个标记：一个结的存在躺在没有安慰能把它放进去之处，躺在任何要确认它的话语之够及之外。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这一不可奠基性远非一个缺陷，而是那使一段关系之存在能成为忠诚之事、而非记录之事者。因为没有句子能奠基那结，那结便搁于句子之外之物上，搁于一种”必须被更新、不能被作为已办结而归档”的持守上。考虑那反例，一段其存在能被一套言词所确立的关系。它的存在,一旦言词被产出,便会被定下、在案、不再攸关；而一个不再攸关的结,是一个人靠产出它的凭证便占有了的结。限度恰恰禁止这。因为关系的存在永不能被登记在案，它便永不能作为凭证被占有，于是它保持它之所以是一个结所必须是者，一个持续攸关、被持守敞开、在持守中被更新之物。读者会认出——无需在此论证——一个不携外在担保的承诺,比一份契约更靠近这一条件：契约把结登记在案、并从而使它成为一份凭证；承诺,什么都不担保,把结留在一段关系的存在一向所在之处,在案之外、在持守之中。那看起来像语言之贫乏的不可奠基性,正是那使一段关系之存在保持为一个行动者。
§3 活的当下
本节取第二个维度——一段关系跨时间的维系——并确立：维系所倚赖者,即两个人实际彼此同在的活的当下,不能被任何陈述所占据,因为陈述这一行为已然把说者置于所陈述之时刻的一段距离之外。其结果是,维系是在场之事、而非陈述之事,而本节经由现象、对”会使当下可说”的两个说明之回顾、内核之隔离、以及主张来表明这一点。
现象
一段关系不仅被带入存在;它还被保持。维系是跨时间把一个结持存活的工作,而它所持者不是一份过去的记录、而是一个活的当下,即两个人实际彼此同在的那个被感的此刻。语言似乎能够及这一当下。我们有为它的时态。我现在爱你。我在这里。这是现在时,当前时刻的语法形式,而它看起来正是为攫取维系所倚赖者而造。
它并不攫取它。当我现在爱你已被说出之时,它所命名的那个”现在”已经溜过。感受的当下,关系活于其中的那实际的当前,总是比要固定它的能指领先一步,于是关于当下的言说总是关于一个刚刚离去的当下的言说。词到达得晚。它所捕获者不是活的此刻、而是一个已在变成过去的此刻之痕迹,而活的此刻本身——维系最需要持守者——恰恰是那从每一个要陈述它的尝试之下跑掉者。
关于可说的当下的两个说明,及它们的残余
有两个说明许诺当下终究能在言说中被够到,而每一个都以它失败的确切方式照亮那限度。
第一个是施行性当下、即指示性”现在”的说明。语言学观察到,像现在、这里、我、这个这样的词从话语这一行为本身取得其指称;我现在爱你里的现在正是言说的那一时刻,于是似乎那词不可能落后于它所命名的时刻,因为它命名它所被说于其中的无论哪一时刻。但这只是把那滞后重新安置。指示性现在指称话语的时刻,然而维系所需的活的当下不是一句话语的刹那;它是同在的那被感的当前,而这本身不是一个言说行为、并被话语打断以命名它。当我为了说我与你同在而停止与你同在时,那说占据了指示所指向的时刻,而它本要报告的那同在,在报告的持续期间已被搁置一旁。指示性当下是真实的,但它是那言说的当下、而非那结的当下,而这两者不是同一个当下。
第二个是活的当下的现象学说明,它更近真相,并因此更精确地标出那限度。现象学把经验的当下描述得不是一个刀刃般的刹那、而是一个厚的此刻,它以持存携带着刚过去者、以前摄携带着即将来者,于是活的当下总是已然是一段通道、而非一个点。梅洛-庞蒂把知觉本身造成这一时间性的厚度,一个从不是赤裸刹那、而是一个运动中之场的当下。这对维系所栖居的当下恰恰说对了,而它恰恰是那击败陈述者。一个陈述固定;它逮住一个内容并把它持住不动以供谓述。活的当下,作为一段通道而非一个点,不能被逮住而不被停下,而一旦被停下,它便不再是活的当下、而是从它那里取出的一张定格。现象学于是告诉我们当下为何不能被说:说它便是固定它,而固定一段通道便是终结那使它活着的通过。
内核
语言在此够不到的内核是关系的当下,它的当前性,结的在此刻之在,对置于每一个关于它一刻之前如何的说明。关系活在一个言说不能占据的当下里,因为言说这一行为已然把说者置于所言说之时刻的一小段距离之外,也因为所论之时刻是一段”固定会终结”的通道。人能叙述关系,而叙述有它的位置,但叙述总是关于刚过去者,而结实际被维系于其上的那活的边缘,停在叙述之前,未被捕获。
主张 —— 当下的不可捕获性。 一段关系被维系于其中的活的当下,不能被任何陈述所占据。指示性当下属于言说的行为、而非它本要报告的同在;经验的厚的当下是一段”固定会逮住并从而终结”的通道。维系所搁于其上者,停在每一个伸手够向它的句子之前。
一个例证性的案例 —— 那一刻的照片。 两个人试图靠记录来持住一个傍晚,一张照片、一张当夜写下的便条、一条说出此刻感觉恰如何的信息。日后那记录是忠实的,而那一刻已从它那里走了,只作为记录所指回、而不包含之物在场。那傍晚曾是的活的同在,无法在被保存下的它之中被找到。这不是一份糟糕记录的失败。最好的记录也不会更好,因为它本要持住的当下是一段通道,而一段通道被保存下者,总是一张已被抽去了通过的定格。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这正是那使维系成为在场之事、而非陈述之事者。因为活的当下不能被说,它便只能被栖居,而一段关系的持守不是反复产出关于它的真句子、而是反复占据一个没有句子持得住的当下。再考虑那反例,一个其当前时刻能被固定于言词中的结。它的维系会在于让言词保持更新,在于在每一刻都发出那一刻的真句子,一种对记录、而非对结的维系;而一段靠让其记录保持更新来维系的关系,会是一段在场已被报告所取代的关系。限度禁止这一替换。因为活的当下不能被逮进一个句子,维系便不能靠句子来了结,并被抛回到在场本身、抛回到没有报告能取代的那在那里。那看起来像现在时之失败的不可捕获性,正是那使维系保持为一种栖居、而非一种归档者。它也是欲望的时间性形式,欲望从能指滑向能指,恰恰因为没有能指曾与它伸手够向的当下重合,这一运动本文在第二部分予以接手。
§4 无处可供定价的关系性价值
本节取第三个维度——一段关系内部所生成的价值——并确立:这样的价值不能被作为一个量级来命名,因为量化预设一个”从其评估价值”的外在之处,而一个只存在于一段关系之内的价值不授予这样一个处。其结果是,关系性价值不能被榨取或定价,而这正是那使它活在结中、而非可供被抽走者。本节经由现象、对”会使关系性价值可评估”的诸说明之回顾、内核之隔离、以及主张来进行。
现象
在一段关系之内,价值被生成。某物开始要紧、开始有分量、开始值得被关切,而这一价值不是从外部被携入、而是在结本身之内生起。语言似乎能够及这一价值。我们把价值的词汇备好:这对我意味着什么、你有多要紧、我们一起的这些年值多少。这些短语把价值呈现得仿佛它是一个量级,一个言说能命名、并在命名中固定的量。
它们并不固定它。一段关系里所生成的价值不是安置在任一人之内、可供读出并报告的属性。它在关系里被生成、并只存在于那里、在之间,而这正是那击败命名者。把一个价值作为一个量级来命名,便是假定一个”从其做出命名”之处,一个在被估价之物之外、从其可评估并写下其价值的立足点。对一个只存在于一段关系之内的价值,没有这样一个外在之处。
两种试图评估它的方式,及它们为何失败
有两条思路许诺关系性的价值能被带入一个共同的度量,而每一条都以一种”显示出限度之结构”的方式失败。
第一条把结中的价值当作一种资本的形式。布迪厄把资本的经济词汇扩展到不是货币的诸善,文化资本与社会资本在其中,并把诸关系分析为可被积累、被兑换、被使产出收益的持有。在这一说明上,一段关系里所生成的价值会是一份社会资本的存量,原则上由它能被兑换成什么来度量。这一说明捕获到某种关于”诸关系如何在权力之诸场中运作”的真实之事,而它恰恰在与我们相关之点上失败。社会资本所度量的价值,是一段关系为它之外某物所具有的价值,即它可被兑换为优势;而在结之内所生成的价值,即结在其自身中、并为身处其中者所具有的价值,恰恰是那不兑换者、那不能被兑成任何外在优势而不停止是它曾是之物者。社会资本从外部、以”它产出什么”的货币来度量关系;所论之价值是那”在关系之外无产出”者,从而在资本的账簿里无位置。
第二条是对一个价值本身之共同度量的诉求,即那内建于任何优化或成本-收益框架中的假设:相异的诸善能被排在一把单一的尺度上,好让它们之间的取舍能被计算。拉兹恰恰针对某些善反对这一假设,持守某些价值是不可通约的,即不存在一把共同的度量,凭它,比方说,一段友谊的价值与一笔钱能被比较,而尝试那比较不是作出一个困难的判断、而是犯下某种关于”这些价值是什么”的错误。在一段关系之内所生成的价值在这一意义上是不可通约的。问它在任何外在货币里值什么、寻它在一把共同尺度上的量级,不是提出一个难的问题、而是误解了那价值,而那价值不是那”有一个量级、在一把与别物共享的尺度上”之类的东西。拉兹命名了那错误;当前的说明在下一段给出它的地基。
内核
语言在此够不到的内核是价值的关系性生成,它在之间、而非在任一方里的生起,这也是它对”任何能从其量化它的外在之处”的拒绝。要点不是那价值巨大、或难以计算、或私人。要点是结构性的,而它奠基拉兹所观察到的不可通约性。量化预设一个外在的知者,他能给任何价值指派一个量级,一个”从其一切价值原则上皆可评估”的位置,一个——用本系列在别处用过的神学figure——被一个”能给一切定价的大他者”所占据的位置。一个只在一段关系之内所生成的价值否认这样一个位置对它存在,因为占据那位置便是站在关系之外,即站在价值所不在之处。没有一个”清于结之外、从其结自身所生成的价值能被度量”的评估者,因为那价值不存在于评估者所能站的任何地方。不可通约性,在这一层面,不是关于某些善的一个奇特事实;它是价值之关系性本体论的后果,据此不存在一个”从其关系性价值能被带入共同度量”的外在高地,因为关系性价值除了在关系里、别无所在。
主张 —— 无外在之处可给关系定价。 在一段关系之内所生成的价值不能被指派一个量级,因为量化要求一个”在被估价之物之外、从其评估价值”的立足点,而关系性价值只存在于关系之内,不提供这样一个立足点。关系性诸善的不可通约性不是一个粗蛮的既与、而是价值之关系性生成的后果:没有一个大他者被安置得能给”只存在于之间”者定价。
一个例证性的案例 —— 无价的岁月。 被问一段长久的共同生活值什么,人发现那问题不是难、而是错,而那错法富有教益。不是那数字巨大或难以计算。而是没有一种货币那价值兑换成、没有一个外在的账簿它能被录入,因为那价值只存在于结里、并不存在于任何能设定一个价格之处。说出一个数目不会低估那些岁月;它会误描它们,把一个”只在关系里有其存在”者当作一把共同尺度上的一个量级来对待。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这正是那使关系性价值免于成为一份占有或一个价格者。因为一个结中所生成的价值不能被作为一个量级写下,它便不能被从结里榨取并携走,不能被存入银行、被交易、或在别处被变现。考虑那反例,一个能被完全定价的关系性价值。被定了价,它便能被出售;被在一种外在货币里变现,它便能被抽走,而关系会被留下持着一个”结曾在之处”的数字。限度禁止这。因为关系性价值无外在之处可供评估,它便无外在之处可供兑现,于是它停留在它被生成之处、在活的结里、不可供榨取。这将在第四部分要紧,那里”关系性价值被外部权力所捕获”被表明只有靠先供给”价值于其中被生成的那些形式本身”才起作用,因为价值本身,一旦在结之内被生成,便不给资本任何”抓住它”之处。此刻要点仅仅是:在一段关系之内所生成的价值,既无处可供定价,便无处可供被拿走,而这一不可抓握性正是那使它保持为一个活的价值、而非一份可变现的资产者。
§5 伦理回应的审美尺度
本节取第四个维度——一段关系所提出的伦理要求——并确立:在其根处,伦理回应搁于一个审美尺度之上,即一种”被感到的合宜”,它不能被转成一个命题,于是伦理是一件被培育之感知之事、而非一件被施用之教义之事。本节陈述现象,回顾他者的独一性以及它借以被迎接的审美register,隔离出内核,并引出主张。这是本文标记为在根处即伦理的维度,而回顾也相应地更充分。
现象
一段关系提出伦理要求,而其中第一个是回应这个人、面前这一个,在其独一性中的要求。语言似乎能满足这一要求。我们有道德言说的诸资源:原则、理由、义务与应得的词汇。看起来仿佛”对另一人行动得好”便是把正确的规则施用于情形,而规则与情形都能被说出。道德哲学里一个长久的传统恰恰在这一表象上进行,把伦理任务当作把一个特定情形归摄于一个一般原则之下。
它们只能被说到一个点,而那点正是伦理开始之处。
他者的独一性
透过任何谓词、任何范畴、任何规则去把握他者,已然是把他们把握为一个类的一个实例,一个所陈述特征的承载者,一个落在描述之下者。列维纳斯把这置于伦理之中心:他者面对我,不是作为一般人性的一个实例、而是作为这一个,其对我的诉求先于并逾越我可能把他们带入其下的每一个范畴,于是伦理关系是一种”与无概念所包含者”之关系。面容,在他的词汇里,恰恰是那抗拒成为一个主题、一个我能陈述并从而掌握之内容者。伦理诉求来自谓词所不穷尽者,来自作为这一他者、而非作为一个类型之一例的这一他者。至此限度是对概念性把握的一个限度:独一者逾越一般者,而他者的诉求从那逾越发出。
但这留下一个列维纳斯未曾充分回答的问题,而它正是承载本节的问题。倘若他者逾越每一条规则,对他们合宜的回应如何被找到?它不能被演绎,因为演绎从一般者做工、而情形是独一的。那么,是什么官能取那”无规则够得到之独一者”之尺度?
审美的register
本文所提议的答案是:那尺度是被审美地取的,在aisthesis(感性、感知)的register里,在它被陈述之前便被感到、并不可化约为任何能从其读出它的规则。说多少、留多少不说,何时进逼、何时收住,一个姿态的确切分量,一段沉默的时机:这一切都被领会,以人领会一条线之正、或一个错音之误的那种方式。它是对合宜的一个感知,而非对它的一个推断。
两个来源使这一register精确。梅洛-庞蒂表明,知觉不是对材料的被动接收、而是对一个情境的主动担起,一种身体性的调谐,它在articulate任何部分之前便把握一个整体,而这一调谐有它自己的智性,一种”在知觉里的知”,没有随后的命题穷尽它。对另一人合宜的回应正是被这一知觉性智性所把握:人感到情境的形状及它所召唤者,作为一个整体,先于并在任何人能陈述的规则之下。杜夫海纳,把现象学扩展到审美经验,把对一个审美对象的知觉描述为”对一个被表达之意义的领会”,这意义只在感知里被给出、并不能被从它分离入一个概念,一个”被感为被知觉者之深度、并在人试图把它离开知觉而陈述的那一刻便丢失”的意义。伦理回应的尺度有这一形式。它是那独一情境的一个被表达之意义,在对它的知觉里被给出、并不可被分离入一个规则。
这正是为何伦理回应不能被命题化。命题陈述一个一般者,而所争的合宜是这一回应、在此、对这一个的合宜。把那被感的尺度转译成一个可陈述的规则,便是以”一个一般者之施用”替换”对一个独一者之知觉”,即是越过恰恰他者的诉求所在于的那一独一性。尺度活在感知里、而死在言说里。
内核
语言在此够不到的内核是伦理回应的审美尺度,即那”不能被转成一个命题的、被感到的合宜”。不是那正确的规则难以找到或难以措辞。而是所争的合宜与一个形式的合宜同类,在知觉里被领会、并在被转译为规则时丢失,因为规则陈述一个一般者、而合宜是独一的。伦理,在其根处,答责于一个在严格意义上是审美的尺度:被aisthesis(感知)、在知觉里所取,而非被知性、在命题里所取。
主张 —— 伦理的审美之根。 对独一他者合宜的回应不能被从任何规则演绎出来,因为规则陈述一般者、而合宜是这一回应对这一个的合宜。它被审美地、在 aisthesis 的 register 里所把握,以人把握一个形式之正的方式,并在被转译成一个命题时丢失。伦理在其根处搁于一个知觉、而非一个教义之上。
一个例证性的案例 —— 无规则给予的时机。 你面前有个人在痛苦中,而问题是说话还是保持沉默,若说话,以何种分量、在何一时刻。没有规则递送答案,因为规则陈述一个一般者、而这是这个人、此刻。引导那合宜回应者是对整个情境的一个知觉,一个被感的尺度,以人感到”再多一个词便是多了一个词”的方式所取。在此回应得好者,不是那些知道更多规则者、而是那些其知觉已被schooled得更精细者,而他们所有者不是一个教义、而是一只眼睛。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这正是那使伦理成为一件被培育之感知之事、而非一件被施用之教义之事者。因为合宜的回应不能被命题化,它便必须被知觉,而伦理生活是对一个”精细到足以取一个独一情形之尺度”的知觉的schooling。考虑那反例,一种被完全写成规则的道德。人会靠查阅规则并施用它来了结它,而那查阅会越过他者的独一性、转向规则把他们带入其下的那个类型;一种被完美编码的伦理,会是一种从不遇见任何人、只遇见情形的伦理。限度禁止这。因为尺度是审美的、不能被编码,伦理便被归还给那受训练的眼与那受训练的耳,归还给一种没有代码能取代的对合宜之感,而伦理生活成为那一感之长久培育。这把伦理维度连到本系列在别处所展开的审美教育,而它将在第四部分归来,那里”为他者不可符号化之内核腾出空间”的伦理被表明搁于恰恰这一知觉性尺度之上。伦理关系里不能被说者不是道德语言的一个失败。它是那”回应这一他者、而非仅仅把一条规则施用于一个情形”根本得以可能的敞开。
§6 正义所守护的生成性
本节取第五个维度——一段关系所亏欠的正义——并确立:正义最亏欠保护者,不仅是一个候着裁决的已定事实、而是关系性存在的生成性,即结的仍在成形的生命,它是实在界对象征界的介入,不能被任何现存的符号秩序预先结清。其结果是,正义在其根处是对生成性的守护、而非对已成形者的结清。本节经由现象、对”把正义当作结清”的两幅图景之回顾、内核之隔离、以及主张来进行。
现象
一段关系亏欠正义,而正义似乎是一切维度中最可说者,因为它活在诉求、程序、判决里,活在陈述这一元素本身之中。正义称量所亏欠者并结清它,而结清便是说。看起来仿佛正义所关切的无论什么,原则上都能被带入符号的秩序,被陈述为一个诉求、被一个判决所处置。有两幅图景加强这一表象,而点名它们、以看它们所遗漏者,是值得的。
把正义当作结清的两幅图景
第一幅是程序性图景,据此正义是一个”以诸诉求为输入、产出诸判决为输出”的程序之正确运行。它的德性是它使正义彻头彻尾可说:一切相关者是一个诉求,而一个诉求是一个陈述。但一个程序作用于已成形者。它取已发生者、把它陈述为一个情形、并处置它,而它构成性地向后看,针对已取了形状、能被带到它面前者。仍在成形者,尚未取诉求所会陈述的那个形状者,不是程序所能接受的一个输入,于是它落在程序之够及之外,不是靠疏忽、而是靠程序的本性。
第二幅是把正义当作对诸不义的追溯性修复、对一个已然造成之伤害的匡正的图景。这也是真实而必要的,而这也向后看。它把那不义作为一个事实、摊开来评估地对待,而它的全部劳作是对已然发生者的处置。此处关于见证的工作以对照的方式富有教益。费尔曼与劳布,研究对灾难的见证,发现最严重的诸不义恰恰抵抗修复所会要求的那种结清,发现它们之中有一个内核,它不成为一个”被评估并被闭合”的可陈述事实、而作为某个”只被作证、从不被处置”者持存。那么即便在追溯性情形里,一个残余也逃脱结清。而在那里逃脱者是我们所关切者的一个版本,尽管本节自己的主题不在过去的不义、而在向前的方向、在仍在成形者。
内核
正义里有某物抵抗结清,而它是正义所必须保护的最深之物。一段正义关系所必须答责者不仅是一个已定事实、而是关系性存在之生成性本身,即结的仍在成形、尚未被定下的生命。这一生成性是实在界对象征界的介入。新者之为新恰恰在于它尚未被现存的诸能指所覆盖,是实在界在既立意义之秩序里撕开的一道裂口。语言在此够不到的内核是关系性存在的这一生成性,即实在界的介入,它不能被任何现存的符号秩序预先结清。把仍在成形者带到已定的符号之下,便是把它从”成为”降格为”已成”,从正义所必须保护的活的生成性、降为一个程序所能处置的完结情形。限度不是正义尚未找到正确的词。而是正义最亏欠保护之对象,凭它作为生成性的本性,正是那些词未曾够到、也不能够到而不终结它者。
主张 —— 正义守护它所不能结清者。 正义最深的对象是关系性存在的生成性,即那实在界的介入不断在既定意义之秩序里开启的仍在成形之生命。这一生成性不能被预先结清,因为结清它便是把”成为”转成”已成”、并从而终结它。正义在其根处因此是对一种”它不能带入已定符号”的生成性的守护、而非仅仅是对已成形者的结清。
一个例证性的案例 —— 结清所错失的委屈。 一个结之内的不义被带到一场清算,被陈述为一个诉求、被称量、被一个商定的修复所处置。那修复是公道的,而不义里仍有某物被它留而未触,一个残余,诉求之陈述携带不了、结清也够不到。清算所处理者是不义就其能被陈述而言;所余者是不义就其不能被陈述而言。那残余不是”结清曾不义”的一个标记。它是一个标记:正义答责于一个结清所不穷尽者。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这正是那使正义免于塌成行政者。因为生成性不能被预先结清,正义便不能被程序所穷尽,而一个配得上其名的正义把自己持守敞开于它自己已定的诸形式所未曾预期者。考虑那反例,一种能靠现存规则处置一切的正义。它会是对已成形者的一种行政,完整而闭合,而恰恰在它的完整里,它会对关系性存在不断生成的新者充耳不闻,因为新者正是没有现存规则曾预期者。限度禁止这一闭合。因为正义所守护的生成性不能被带到已定符号之下,正义便必须使自己答责于逾越其程序者,并拒绝给自己那”已然预见一切之程序”的虚假完整。这一持守敞开的样式,一种”持守它所不能处置者”的知,在第四部分以见证之名被接手。正义所不能带入已定符号者不是法律里的一个缺口。它是那”法律为之而存在以持守敞开”的活的生成性。
§7 不可说的成长方向
本节取第六个也是最后一个维度——一段关系的演化——并确立:一个结的真正成长之方向不能被以现在可用的诸能指陈述,因为真正的新奇按定义正是当前词汇所不包含者,于是一段关系是一个被经受的成为、而非一个被执行的计划。本节经由现象、对”会使成长方向可预先说出”的诸说明之回顾、内核之隔离、以及主张来进行,并以把六个限度聚拢入它们共有的形式来收束第一部分。
现象
一段关系成长并转变。它生成它未曾有的诸形式,历经岁月成为任一方在开端都不可能预先立出者。语言似乎能够及这一成长,至少在前景里。我们计划、我们想象、我们说出我们正朝向何处:我们将建造什么、我们将成为谁、我们的生活将成长成什么。这些句子把一个结之发展的方向呈现得仿佛它能在行走之前被摊出。
它们只摊出当前已然包含者。
两种说出未来的方式,及它们的限度
有两个说明许诺成长方向能被预先陈述,而每一个都以它欠缺的形式表明真正的新奇是什么。
第一个是预测,从当前的趋势对一个未来的投射。预测有力、且常常正确,而它有一个确定的范围:它陈述未来就未来是当前之延续、是对已然在进行者的外推而言。但恰恰因此,预测只够及”当前已然蕴含”的未来。它所不能够及者是那真正新的,即那”不是对当前趋势的外推、而是对它们的断裂”的形式,因为这样一个形式不被包含在当前的材料里、从而不能被从它们投射。预测陈述那已然潜伏的未来;真正成长的方向是那不潜伏的未来,而预测与它擦身而过。
第二个是把未来当作一个计划之实现、一个被意图之设计之执行的说明。一对着手建造某个形状的生活,而那建造实现那设计。这也有它的真、这也有它的限度。一个计划只能规定它的作者已然能设想者,以他们已然可用的词汇;它以当前的术语摊出一个未来。但一段真正演化的关系成为某个它的成员在开端不可能规定者,某个他们那时尚无其词者,而这不是计划之失败、而是真正成长的标记。凡结果在预先便完全可规定之处,便没有演化、只有一个设计的展卷。计划够及它已然能陈述的未来;真正成长的方向是它所不能者,而计划不包含它。
内核
语言在此够不到的内核是关系之成为的方向,它的真正新奇,不能被以现在可用的诸能指陈述。要点不是未来以寻常方式不确定,一个已知的、尚未被决定的结果范围;那一类不确定仍以当前术语被陈述,作为一个跨被预见之可能的分布。要点是那真正新的形式根本尚不可说,因为它的可说性会要求那些”其缺席正是那使它为新者”的能指本身。真正成长的方向是那尚不可符号化者,而它停在言说之前,不是靠偶然、而是靠新奇之所是。这是正义所被表明去守护的同一生成性的向前一面:那里,仍在成形者作为保护的对象;这里,尚不可说者作为成长的方向。
主张 —— 成长方向不能被预先说出。 一段关系真正演化的方向不能被以现在可用的诸能指陈述,因为真正的新奇恰恰是当前词汇所不包含者。预测只够及那潜伏的未来,计划只够及那已然可设想者;新的形式是尚不可符号化的,并凭新奇之所是停在每一个预先描述之前。
一个例证性的案例 —— 两人都不可能描述的生活。 两个人带着一幅”他们将建造的生活”之图景着手,而多年之后他们是某个那图景未曾包含者,不是对计划的一个偏离、而是一个计划无其词的成长。在开端被要求描述他们所成为者,他们不可能,因为那些术语那时尚非他们的。那成为之为真实恰恰在于它跑赢了它可用的描述。他们不可能预先说出者不是他们远见里的一个缺口。它是那”关系成长入无人尚有其词者”的房间。
这里限度何以是生成性的
这正是那使一段关系之演化保持敞开、而非被执行者。因为真正成长的方向不能被预先说出,一段关系便不是一个被执行的计划、而是一个被经受的成为,而它的未来在活着里被生成、而非从一个设计里被读出。考虑那反例,一段其发展能被事先完全陈述的关系。它会没有强意义上的未来、只有一个被预见之序列的展卷,一段作为其自身章程之执行而被过的生活。限度禁止这。因为真正成长的方向是尚不可说的,一段关系的未来便不能被预先陈述、从而不能仅仅被执行;它必须被经受,在行走里被生成,敞开于尚不在语言里的诸形式。不能被预先说出者不是远见的失败。它是那”一段关系仍能成长为无人尚有其词者”的空间。
图一 —— 一个裂隙上的六扇窗。 中心处立着 manque(匮乏);围绕它,布置为六扇窗,是关系性生活的六个维度——存在(结之在)、维系(活的当下)、价值(无处可供定价)、伦理(审美尺度)、正义(生成性被守护)、演化(不可说的方向)。在每一维度上,语言伸手够向一个它触不到的内核,而在每一处,那内核都是同一个 manque 的一副面孔。这一并行不是一个排名;它是共享一个形式的六个有结构的现象。
六个限度如今在我们面前,每一个各有它的内核、各有它的主张:结之存在的不可奠基性、活的当下的不可捕获性、无一外在之处可给关系性价值定价、伦理回应的审美尺度、正义所守护的生成性、以及不可被预先说出的成长方向。它们被并排放置,不被排名、也不被从彼此推导,而这一并行是有意的:语言的限度不是一个含糊的不足、而是六个各不相同、各有结构的现象。然而跨越所有六者,一个单一的形式已然显现。在每一处,语言伸手够向某物而够不到它;在每一处,它够不到的内核是符号之运算留在自身之外的一个残余;而在每一处,这够不到不是一个缺陷、而是那使那一维度的关系性生活是其所是的条件。第二部分追问什么立于这些限度处,把它追溯到言说主体的构成,并给它一个名字。
第二部分 · 裂隙的现象学:在 manque 处的下降
§8 进入象征界,与前符号的残余
本节开启第二部分,它把六个限度共有的形式追溯到它的源头。目的是确立:语言在六个维度的每一个里所不能够及的残余,有一个单一的源头,在言说主体的构成之中,而精神分析命名这一源头:主体是在能指里、被一个”把一部分留在自身之外、在实在界的register里”的运算所构成的。本节铺陈进入语言的精神分析说明,追随那”残余借以被产生”的进入之两个时刻,区分它所使用的实在界之义,并表明第一部分的六个内核是这一个残余的表达。
从六个限度到一个源头
第一部分留下一个结果与一个问题。结果是:在关系性生活的每一维度里,语言伸手够向一个它够不到的内核,而在每一处那够不到都是生成性的。问题是:为何同一个形式会在”一个结之存在、一个伦理回应之尺度、成长之方向”这样彼此如此不同的诸维度上再现。六个限度、一个形式,要求一个源头,而那源头不是靠把诸维度彼此比较来找到、而是靠下降到它们之下、下降到那”在它们全体之中言说的主体”的构成。
在能指里被构成的主体
成为一个言说的主体,便是被担入象征秩序,即那先于主体并结构它的能指之场。这是拉康对弗洛伊德之重读的枢轴,而它的后果是精确的。那在能指里来到存在的主体,不是一个语言随后表达的在先的充盈。它是在能指里、并由能指所构成的,而不存在一个”在这一构成之后或之前、人可诉诸”的言说主体。芬克小心地陈述这一机制:主体是”被一个能指为另一个能指所表征”者,一个只在链的运动里显现、并离开它便无实体的主体。主体是能指的一个effect、而非它的源头。
在能指之前,有一个阶段,人类的婴儿在一个外在的影像里找到一个被预期的统一,一个从自身之外的形式借来的融贯,而这一借来的融贯已然在主体与它自己存在之地基之间安置了一段距离。那影像给出一个身体尚未有的统一,而围绕它形成的自我从一开始便是一个与某个他者的认同,一个奠基于一个外部之上的自我。当能指到来,它不弥合这一距离、而使它加倍,因为如今主体必须在一个同样先于并逾越它的符号之场里找到自己。进入语言是主体在”非自身者”之上的第二次、也是决定性的奠基。
异化与分离的两个时刻
进入能指能被以两个时刻来追随,而残余是在第二个里被产生的。在第一个时刻,精神分析称之为异化,主体把大他者的诸能指担起、作为根本得以显现的唯一手段,并以一个丧失为它的显现付账:被一个能指所表征便是被化约为那能指所能携带者,而进入的那活的存在未被完全携带。在第二个时刻,分离,主体面对大他者本身里的一个欠缺,即大他者的能指之链不闭合、不包含”主体对它而言是什么”之答案这一事实,而在这一面对里,欲望的对象-成因被产生,在那两个欠缺相遇之点上。对当前论证要紧者是:这一双重运算并不把主体之全体聚入能指。它靠一个切割构成主体,而那切割把主体存在的一部分留在能指之外,未被那”使主体成为一个主体”的结构所捕获。
弗洛伊德已然在意识言说的主体之下,找到一个被别样地统辖的领域,并把从它升起的压力命名为驱力(Trieb),一种在躯体与心理之边界上的、朝向满足施压而从不被简单平息的力。拉康的贡献是表明:进入能指正是那产生这一边界者,那构成主体为一个言说者的运算本身,把驱力的那一份留在能指之外。这一未被捕获的份额便是残余,而它不是一个更充盈的符号化日后或许能聚入的余留。它是符号化之运算,凭其本性,所留在外者。
一个例证性的案例 —— 那从不合身的词。 一个人,从早年生活起,携带着一种”被想要”的方式,被给予他们的任何词都从不合它,一种在交给他们的语言里无名的压力。在成年的亲密里它仍施压,塑造着他们所寻、却说不出自己在寻者。不是正确的词被扣住、并或许仍可被供给。从来没有一个正确种类的词,因为所施压者恰恰是进入言词所留在外的那一份。那无名的压力不是他们词汇的一个失败。它是那残余,被感到。
哪一个实在界
实在界这个词必须被小心地使用,因为拉康在他的教学里给了它不止一个义。在早期著作里,实在界近于那粗蛮的既与,那”总在它的位置上、先于将切割它的象征articulation”者。在成熟与晚期著作里,它成为那不可能者,符号化的内在限度,那”不停止不被写”者。当前的文章主要在第二个、成熟的义上取实在界,作为内在限度、而非一个外在既与,而它把前符号的残余接手为那同一限度的genetic方面,而非一个”躺在符号背后的、分立的粗蛮领域”。下一节表明这是同一个裂隙的两副面孔。此处要点仅仅是固定这一用法:与本文相关的实在界是能指之运算所产生的残余,主体化的内在切下料,而非一个”躺在语言背后、语言够不到”的充盈。
残余作为六个内核的源头
前符号的残余,这样理解,便是六个限度所指向的源头。语言所不能够及者——在存在里、在维系里、在价值里、在伦理里、在正义里、在演化里——在每一情形里都是这同一个残余的一个形式,即能指之运算留在自身之外的那一部分。结之存在、活的当下、价值的关系性生成、审美尺度、正义所守护的生成性、成长的方向:每一个都是那”言说主体的构成所不能担入能指的一个东西”的一副面孔。六个维度是朝向一个单一裂隙的六扇窗。下一节给这裂隙以它的两副面孔、并表明它们是一个,再下一节给这裂隙以它的对象。
§9 实在界的两副面孔
本节确立:立于六个限度之源头处的裂隙有两副面孔,一副是genetic(发生的)、一副是逻辑的,而它们是同一个裂隙。目的是表明:前符号的残余(一部分在起源处被切下)与完全符号化的不可能(一个永不能被达成的闭合)不是两个条件、而是一个,于是单一的名字 manque 覆盖二者。本节先取genetic的面孔,把逻辑的面孔作为一个后果、而非一个分立的设定从它抽出,回顾那”会把二者持分开”的读法,并陈述主张。
genetic 的面孔
在genetic上,如前一节所铺陈,一个残余在言说主体的构成里被切下。某物在主体被担入象征秩序时被留在能指之外。这是一个关于”一个言说主体如何来到存在”的事实:它靠一个切割来到存在,而那切割把一份留在实在界里。genetic的面孔是一个关于起源的主张。曾有,在主体的构成里,一个分离的运算,而那运算有一个残余。
从 genetic 抽出的逻辑面孔
从此逻辑的面孔随出,而次序要紧:逻辑者不是一个独立的论题、而是genetic者的后果。因为一个残余在那”安置象征秩序”的运算本身里被留在能指之外,那秩序的完全闭合便不是一个仍待完成的任务、而是一个不可能之事。象征界不能闭合于全体之上,因为它自己的安置便是一部分的被留在外。这一不可能不是经验的,不是”能指迄今未能覆盖一切、或许日后借更好工具会成功”之事。它是结构的。那”建起象征秩序”的运算与那”产生秩序所不能包含者”的运算是同一个,于是那秩序运行于一个构成性的不闭合之上。芬克确切地抽出这一后果:不存在元语言、不存在一个”能闭合于自身、并言说它自己之全体”的表意系统,因为每一个这样的系统都奠基于那奠基它的排除之上。这是逻辑意义上的实在界,即拉康在晚期教学里作为不可能者、作为”那不停止不被写者”所接近者:不是那仅仅尚未被说者、而是那不可能被完全说者,即符号化把它自己的限度作为一个限度、而非作为一个边疆所遇之点。
反对把两副面孔持分开
把两副面孔分开或许看起来更清爽:把前符号的残余当作一个发育性的设定,一个”原则上能被免除”的某个-在先者,并把闭合的不可能搁于一个纯逻辑的、关于自指的论证之上,以那些”关于’不能证明自身一致性之系统’的形式结果”的方式。拉康的某些读法倾向于此,把实在界当作要么是那神话的在先、要么是那逻辑的限度,并在它们之间选择。当前的文章谢绝这一选择,而缘由是说明内在的。逻辑的不可能,单独取来,是一个关于形式系统的事实;它本身不解释为何在那不可能之点应有一个驱力、一个被感的压力。genetic的切割,单独取来,是一个关于起源的故事;它本身不确立闭合在原则上不可能、而非仅仅未被达成。持守到一起,每一个供给另一个所欠者。genetic的切割解释为何那不可能是被栖居的、为何有一个压力而非仅仅一个形式的缺口:因为那残余是主体自己存在的一部分,被留在外、并施压着要返回。逻辑的不可能解释为何那切割永不能被弥合、为何那压力是永久的、而非一个时间或许会闭合的伤口。两副面孔是一个,因为唯有一起它们才给出本文所追者:一个同时也是一个驱力的不可能。
单一的裂隙
两副面孔是一个裂隙。Manque(那欠缺、那构成性的want)命名它。它是genetic的,在于一部分被切下,而它是逻辑的,在于一部分既被切下,闭合便成为不可能。在起源处被留在外者,正是那永不能在终点被聚入者,而第一部分里没有句子能够到它的内核之缘由是:那内核,在每一情形里,都是 manque:那”其被切下与其永不能被说的不可能是同一个”的残余。
主张 —— 单一的裂隙。 前符号的残余与完全符号化的不可能不是两个条件、而是同一个 manque 的两副面孔。因为主体是被一个”把一部分留在实在界里”的切割所构成,象征秩序便不能闭合;genetic 的 want 奠基逻辑的不可能,而逻辑的不可能使 genetic 的 want 永久。单独任一副面孔都产不出一个”同时也是一个驱力”的不可能;持守到一起,它们产得出。
§10 对象在裂隙处的下降
本节确立什么在裂隙处取形。目的是表明:objet petit a 不是一个”填满那欠缺”的对象、而是那欠缺在欲望之经济里所取的形式,即 manque 为使欲望转起来而采取的形状,而它恰恰靠”不是那欠缺之填满”来持守它的位置。本节陈述”误读那对象”的诱惑,以其精神分析根据给出正确的说明,追随那对象经它的几个形式、作为驱力所环绕的部分对象,回顾那”会把它当作一个可达之物”的读法,并引出那准备”把驱力从欲望区分开”的后果。
什么下降,以及它不是什么
在裂隙处某物取形。它不是一个填满裂隙之物,也不是一个闭合它的内容。它是那”裂隙在欲望之经济里被给予一个形状”的方式,而精神分析称它为 objet petit a,欲望的对象-成因。说明中的一切都取决于把那对象与”一个对象”的寻常观念持分开,而把二者塌到一起的诱惑很强,因为”对象”这个词邀请它。
对象-成因,而非欲望之对象
objet a 不是欲望所寻的对象,它所瞄准并可能达成的靶。它是对象-成因,欲望从其被发动之点,而它立在 manque 的位置上。拉康在关于四个基本概念的研讨班里尖锐地划出这一区分:驱力所环绕的对象不是那”会满足一个需要”的对象、而是那”维系着环绕”的对象-成因,而驱力的回路由这一对象作为”它所环绕的一个缺席、而非它所够到的一个在场”所定义。齐泽克在评注里给这一点它最尖锐的表述:objet a 不是一个正向的实体、而是欲望之空被给予一个形式,一个”其实只是一个欠缺之物质化”的对象,以致那看起来像欲望之成因者,是那欠缺本身戴着一个对象的面具。裂隙本身是无形式的,一个纯粹的残余,一个 want。objet a 是那 want 进入欲望之场时所取的形式,即 manque 为使欲望转起来而采取的形状。它不回答那欠缺。它给那欠缺一个figure,并靠给它一个figure,让它作为一个运动的枢轴起作用。
对象的诸形式
对象-成因不是一个东西、而是以几个形式显现,而追随它们使它的品性更清楚,因为诸形式所共有者恰恰是那”把对象-成因从任何寻常对象区分开”者。精神分析在这些形式中不仅列出早年诸驱力的对象,而且——在拉康的扩展里——列出凝视与嗓音。引人注目的是,这些根本不是人抓取的对象。凝视不是我所看见者、而是”从一个我不能占据之点被看见”之感,视野之场里一个回望着、我永不能带入我自己视野的点。嗓音不是所说者、不是所携的意义、而是那”没有意义所吸收”的发声之残余,是那”当一段嗓音里一切可说者都已被理解时仍持存”者。这些每一个都是一个构成性地够不到的对象,只作为某个逃逸者被给出,而这正是为何它们能充当对象-成因的诸形式。诸形式所共有者不是一个人能持有的属性、而是一种逃逸的方式,而正是那逃逸、而非任何内容,使它们能figure那欠缺、并使欲望转起来。对象-成因是那”在一个场里、作为它够不到之点起作用”的无论什么。
一个例证性的案例 —— 那不能回还的注视。 两个人之间常有一种”一方感到被另一方看见、而不能应召回还”的方式,一种”被持于一个其确切之点自己永不能占据或验证的注视中”之感。它不是一个人能靠询问来确认的事实,因为询问已然是从它里落出。这一”从一个人够不到之点被看见”是作为对象-成因的凝视,那欠缺的一个形式,结环绕它而转,只作为那”逃逸那本要保全它的注视本身”者被给出。
反对那可达之对象
被作为一个寻常对象来读,objet a 会是某个人能够到并持有之物,而欲望会是达成它的计划。这一概念的全部临床与理论分量都反对这一读法,而刚才所巡视的诸形式表明何以。凝视与嗓音不能被达成;它们只作为逃逸者被给出。倘若 objet a 一般地被达成并持有,它所形成的裂隙便会被闭合,而那裂隙正是给了那对象它的职分者。被达成,它便会停止是对象-成因、而成为一个纯然之物;而欲望,发现它是一个纯然之物,便会过去,因为欲望所环绕者从来不是那物、而是那物一直在figure的 want。这是那”在拥有里令人失望”的对象的熟悉结构,它的占有揭示出:所想要者从来不是那占有。objet a 只在它保持为一个欠缺的形式、而非那欠缺之取消时,才持守它的力量。
后果
两件事随出,而它们组织下一节。第一,因为对象是一个欠缺的形式、而非一个可达之物,那”环绕它而转的运动”便是一个”不瞄准终结”的运动,一个环绕、而非一个够到。第二,因为没有能指、没有物与那对象所figure的 want 重合,便也有一个”沿诸能指跑而不歇息”的运动,一个滑动、而非一个环绕。一个是驱力、另一个是欲望,而二者都转于那”在裂隙处下降而从不闭合它”的对象。下一节把它们分开,并表明关系性生活需要二者。
§11 盘旋的驱力,滑动的欲望
本节确立本文所需的、在”两个环绕裂隙而转的运动”——驱力与欲望——之间的区分,并表明关系性生活需要二者。目的是给每一个它的结构,驱力作为一个”其满足在于回路”的环绕、欲望作为一个”沿能指之链的换喻式滑动”,并给每一个指派一个在关系生命里的确定职分,一个供给它的恒常内核、另一个供给它的时间中之运动。本节先取驱力、再取欲望,回顾那”固定各自”的精神分析来源,并陈述它们的联合必要性。
驱力,环绕空的回路
驱力(Trieb)盘旋。它的运动是环绕对象-成因的一个转,而它的满足,在精神分析赋予它的那个精确而起初陌生的意义上,在于那环绕本身、而非在于任何对象之达成。弗洛伊德已然注意到,驱力奇怪地独立于它的对象,对象是一个驱力里最可变者、并非原初便与它相连,于是满足不在于够到一个预定之物。拉康把这磨利为回路的拓扑学:驱力不够到它的对象并歇息、而是环绕它作一个回路,而它的满足在那”出去与返回”的闭合环里,目标在运动里、而非在目的里被成全。这是驱力的能量拓扑学,一个环绕一个空的闭合回路,由”那空不被填满”这一事实本身所维系。在它背后立着弗洛伊德最困难的主张:在快乐原则之外有一个重复的强迫,一个”不顾快乐而返回于同一者、环绕一个位置而非寻求一个满足”的压力。驱力给一段关系者,是关于”为何那结有一个不熄灭的内核”之说明,一个不熄灭的压力,它在中心不断转着,从一个”因不寻求终点而无终点”的环绕里汲取它的恒常。
欲望,沿链的滑动
欲望(désir)滑动。它的运动不是一个环绕、而是一个换喻,一个”沿能指之链从一个到下一个、歇息于无一者”的通过。拉康把欲望定位于表意之链的结构本身:因为意义由”从能指到能指的运动”所产生、而没有能指递送一个最终的所指,欲望便沿链在一个无尽的换喻里跑,总是被带过它所够向的能指、朝向下一个。欲望被那”驱力所环绕”的同一个 manque 所发动,但驱力环绕那空,欲望则沿诸能指跑,每一个能指都许诺而无一个递送,于是欲望被无尽地带向前。欲望给一段关系者,是关于”为何它不断在时间里重组自己、为何那结不安顿入一个固定的figure、而是历经新的诸形式、新的诸词、新的诸对象移动、总在移位”之说明,因为它所够到的没有能指是那”会平息它”的能指。
图二 —— 一个裂隙上的两个运动。 驱力(金色)环绕 objet a 所标记的空作一个闭合回路,在环绕里、而非在任何攫取里被满足。欲望(玫瑰色)沿能指之链 S₁ → S₂ → S₃ → ⋯ 滑动,歇息于无一者。二者都被同一个 manque 所发动;无一者闭合它。
为何这一区分,以及为何二者
这一区分不是一个经院式的精修、而是现象的一个要求。一段关系显示两个”没有单一运动能解释”的特征。它有恒常,一个”历经变化而持存”的内核,即一个结”历经岁月的更改仍是它自己”的那一意义。而它有发展,一个历经诸形式的运动,即一个结”不停立不动、而不断成为”的那一意义。一个单一的运动不能奠基二者。单独的环绕会给出恒常而无发展,一个”持守它的内核而从不移动、被判罚重复”的结。单独的滑动会给出发展而无恒常,一个”无尽移动而无内核、没有历经运动而持存之自我”的结。唯有二者一起才给出一段关系实际所是者,一个然而在运动中的恒常。
主张 —— 两个运动及其职分。 驱力与欲望是环绕那一个裂隙的相异运动,而一段关系需要二者。驱力环绕对象-成因、并在回路里被满足;它供给那恒常的内核,那不熄灭的压力。欲望沿能指之链滑动、并歇息于无一者;它供给时间中的运动,历经诸形式的移位。无发展的恒常会是重复;无恒常的发展会是消散;一个结的生命是它们的复合。
在裂隙处相接
二者在裂隙处相接、在它们的运动里相分。驱力供给能量拓扑学,那未花掉的内核;欲望供给象征运动,那时间中的移位。二者都从那”无一者闭合”的同一个 manque 汲取它们的生命,驱力环绕那够不到者、而欲望滑动因为它够不到它。一个结的持存——在第三部分被接手——是这二者的共同做工,而下一节的思想实验表明:倘若它们所转于其上的裂隙曾被闭合,二者会成为什么。
§12 那会熄灭的闭合
本节是本文的形式中心。它的目的是靠一个已知为反事实的思想实验确立:闭合那裂隙不会成全驱力与欲望、而会熄灭它们,因而语言之不闭合是它们持存的形式条件。本节陈述那反事实及其目的,以各得其自身处理的三步展开那后果,引出对寻常图景的反转,并陈述本文的中心主张:驱力是限度的现象学。
反事实及其用途
关于两副面孔的一节确立了完全符号化是不可能的。姑且假设,与之相反、并仅为论证之故,它是可能的。假设那裂隙被闭合、那残余被聚入能指、那实在界被无损带入象征界。这一假设是反事实的、并已知如此;本文不主张那裂隙能被闭合,并已论证它不能。这一假设的用途是别样的。靠追问”闭合会做什么,倘若它可能”,本节表明”不闭合所保全者”,并从而表明:先前所确立的不可能不是一个剥夺、而是生命的一个条件。这一类思想实验不断言它的前提。它从一个它拒绝的前提来推理,以暴露那前提之否认的价值。
第一步,驱力盘旋因为它的对象缺席
驱力盘旋因为它的对象缺席。这在关于对象与关于两个运动的诸节里被确立:objet a 所标记者是一个空,而驱力环绕那空而转;那环绕只因为中心有一个 want 而非一个物,才有它的拓扑学。回路是一个缺席的回路。移除那缺席,便没有可环绕者、没有空可描出环。第一步仅仅固定那环绕所倚赖者:不是一个”在中心在场”的对象、而是一个缺席的对象,一个被给予形式的 want。驱力的全部运动都以”它所环绕之处的空”为前提。
第二步,闭合填满那中心
现在假设那裂隙被闭合。这是那反事实的一着,而它的内容是确切的:中心的那 want 被填满、那缺席被造成在场、那空被一个被达成的对象所取代。先前诸节所说的一切”不可能发生者”在此被假设发生,为看它的后果之故。objet a,它曾是一个欠缺的形式,会成为一个被占有之物;那残余,它曾从能指之外施压,会被聚入;那实在界,它曾是象征界的内在限度,会被无残余地溶入象征界。驱力曾环绕的那中心如今会被占据。会有,在那 want 的位置上,一个在场。
第三步,环绕停下,两个运动都死去
驱力不再有一个空可环绕。它的回路已丧失那”给了它形状”的空,而一个环绕被填满之中心的回路根本不是回路;那环塌到它曾围住的点上。环绕因此停下,而随之驱力不是被成全、而是被熄灭。看出这是熄灭、而非满足,是要紧的。人或许会预期填满那 want 便是满足驱力,因为驱力似乎朝那 want 之填满施压;但驱力的满足在那环绕里、而非在那填满里,而填满那中心便是移除那环绕的条件、并从而终结驱力所曾有的唯一满足。欲望,就它而言,已无处可滑,因为能指之链之所以向前跑,只因为没有能指与那物重合,而如今那重合已被假设;那链到达,而一到达,便停住。那假设所递送者不是驱力与欲望的满足、而是它们的死。那被想象为一种成全的完全符号化之状态,其实是一种静止,一个”无物再施压、无物再转动、无物再被生成”的结。
反转
这一结果反转寻常的图景。在寻常图景上,裂隙是一个缺陷、而它的闭合会是一种成全,即驱力终于够到它的对象、欲望终于回到家的那一刻。思想实验表明相反者。那看起来像成全的闭合是熄灭,而那看起来像剥夺的不闭合是”驱力与欲望根本得以持续”的条件。完全符号化的不可能,在关于两副面孔的一节里作为不可能被确立,在此显示它的另一方面。不仅是那裂隙不能被闭合。而是它之不被闭合正是那”使驱力盘旋、使欲望滑动”者,也就是那”使关系保持运动”者。
主张 —— 闭合会熄灭、而非成全。 倘若那裂隙被闭合,驱力会丧失它的回路所环绕的空、并会停下,被熄灭而非被满足,而欲望会丧失那”沿链带它前行的不重合”、并会停住。语言之不闭合因此不是一个剥夺、而是驱力与欲望之持存的形式条件,而完全符号化的不可能正是那”使一段关系保持运动”者。
图三 —— 闭合的反事实。 当中心是一个空时(左),驱力持一个环绕它的回路,而那结保持运动——敞开,驱力盘旋,活着。倘若那裂隙被填满(右),已知为不可能、并仅为论证而假设,那回路便会无可围住、并会塌陷——闭合,回路塌陷,被熄灭。此图靠表明”它的否认会付什么代价”来描绘”不闭合所保全者”。
驱力作为限度的现象学
本文的中心主张如今能被陈述。倘若驱力只活在裂隙敞开之处、并死在裂隙闭合之处,那么驱力就不是一个”裂隙所扣住、而一个闭合会递送”的内容。驱力是那敞开的裂隙显示自身的方式,是语言之限度的被感形式。它不是在限度之后候着;它就是那限度,在显现。
主张 —— 驱力是限度的现象学。 驱力不是一个语言遗漏、并可能日后找回的内容。驱力是 manque 的现象学,是语言之限度本身的被感形式。这正是为何”符号化那裂隙”之尝试返回的不是驱力、而是它的再度逃逸:人所试图说者不是别的,正是符号化所不能闭合者,于是那说发现裂隙已经移动,而那驱力——它曾是那裂隙在显示自身——已再一次溜出词的够及之外。
第三部分 · 驱力的持存:铭刻与关系的时间
§13 症状作为对不可符号化者的忠诚
本节开启第三部分,它追随驱力之持存进入一个主体的生命与一段关系的时间。它的目的是确立:症状,透过限度的说明来读,不是一个”应被清除”的故障、而是一种忠诚:一种在重复的register里、对一个”从未被符号化的内核”保持被结着的方式。本节陈述症状的寻常观点,把重复的精神分析说明对置于它,给出本文所提议的读法,并引出对”读一个生命”的后果。
寻常观点及其限度
倘若驱力是限度的现象学,那么它的诸效果便不局限于一个单一的时刻、而是持存跨越一个主体的生命与一个结的生命,而这一持存变得可读的第一个地方是症状。一个症状,在精神分析的意义上,是一个返回的构成物,一个”在一个主体的生命里、以一种主体不选择、且常常不想要的恒常性重复”的模式。寻常观点把它当作一个过错、心灵里一块出了错、应被纠正并消解的部分,以一个医学症状的模型——它指向一个失调、并在失调被治愈时消失。这一观点有它的用途,而它有一个限度,即重复的精神分析说明所暴露者。
重复作为未被符号化者之返回
弗洛伊德发现症状不屈从于”一个应被纠正之过错”的模型。在对重复的分析里,他发现一个”返回于同一者”的强迫,一个”不服务于快乐、并不在其意义被解释时消解、而是仿佛被结着于某个解释够不到之物而返回”的重复之压力。拉康给了它结构性的读法:所重复者是主体与实在界的关系,与那”未被担入能指之点”的关系,而重复是那未被符号化之点的坚执,是它在”言说的register已未能容纳它之后、对它可用的唯一register”里的返回。症状,在这一说明上,不是象征界里的一个过错、而是那”象征界所不能聚入者”的标记,作为重复返回,因为它不能作为陈述显现。
症状作为忠诚
本文提议把这读作一种忠诚。症状重复,因为它被结着于某个从未被符号化之物,一个”在能指里找不到位置、于是以这样一个内核所能的唯一方式——作为一个再来、而非一个陈述——返回”的实在界内核。这样看,症状是主体”对不能被说者保持被结着”的方式。它是一种在重复的register里持守的、对一个”言说的register容纳不了的残余”的忠诚。这一读法不否认一个症状能携带的苦,也不劝阻”松动一个症状之抓握”的工作。它重构那工作所遇者。所重复者不是纯然的错误、而是依恋,主体对一个”恰恰因为它不能被说出而要紧的内核”之系,而症状的恒常是那一系的恒常。
主张 —— 症状作为忠诚。 症状不仅是一个故障、而是一种忠诚:一种在重复的 register 里、对一个”从未被担入能指的内核”保持被结着。它返回,因为它所结着于者不能作为陈述显现、于是作为再来显现。症状的恒常是驱力之环绕的恒常,被在一个生命里弄得可读。
读一个生命
这样读,症状是驱力之持存在一个生命里被弄得可见。不能被说者并不因此消失;它施压,而它的施压取一个返回的形式,一个环绕,它随时间显示自身为一个模式的再来、一幕被重演的场景、一个被重新担起的位置。症状的恒常是驱力之环绕的恒常,被跨越一个生命的长度、而非在一个单一的转里看见,而它对被论理掉的拒绝是实在界对”被劝说进象征界”的拒绝。人不能靠解释来消解一个”其全部本性便是作为解释所留在外者”之物。一个人所形成的结、他们在其中所担起的位置、跨越他们诸关系再来的那幕场景,这一切都携带着一个”从未被符号化、并继续组织着它周围所发生者”的内核之标记。下一节把这追随进关系的时间,那里一个早年的能指被表明去塑造远在其后来到的诸结。
§14 早年的能指与关系的时间
本节确立驱力之持存给一段关系的时间性结构。它的目的是表明:一个结不仅活在它自己的当下里、而是活在”远在它开始之前便被铭刻的诸能指”的压力之下,而第二部分所区分的两个运动——盘旋的驱力与滑动的欲望——一起说明一段关系性历史那奇特的形状,即同时忠诚于一个它未曾选择的内核、又被携向前进入它不可能预见的诸形式。本节铺陈那早年的铭刻,表明两个运动在关系的时间里做工,并引出关于”一段关系性历史之形状”的主张。
早年的铭刻
在一个生命的早年,某些能指被以一个”主体未曾指派、并不能撤销的分量”铭刻。一个名字、一个短语、一幕在大他者最早之场里被给予一个形式的场景,这些担起”组织主体与对象-成因之关系”的职分,而它们不在主体成长、形成新结时失去那职分。这是第二部分之说明的时间性够及。在主体的构成里被切下的残余,不是被切下一次然后被留在身后;它被切的方式,即”主体最早与欠缺之关系被组织于其周围的那些特定能指”,作为一个结构持存,后来的诸关系已被塑造地进入它。拉康”无意识如语言般被结构”这一坚持,恰恰有这一时间性后果:一个早年被铺下的能指不随时间褪去、而是保留它的结构之力,组织着”什么能被欲望、以何种方式”,远在它的起源被遗忘之后。
关系时间里的两个运动
那后来的关系被一个”已被标记、已以某种方式环绕它的空而转”的主体所进入,而此处两个运动的分工归来并做它的工。驱力说明”为何那早年的内核不熄灭”。它的环绕是一个重复,而重复恰恰是”一个东西不靠选择被更新而持存”的样式;那早年的铭刻持久,因为驱力不断环绕它,历经岁月未被花掉。欲望说明”为何那关系然而不断移动、为何主体不只是不变地重复同一个结、而是历经新的诸figure、新的诸伴侣、同一个转的新的诸形式而滑动”。欲望沿链把主体携向前,在每一个新的能指里寻求上一个所未给者,而驱力在那运动之下把中心持守恒常。一段关系的生命是二者的复合:一个驱力不断环绕的恒常内核,与一个欲望不断生成的时间中之移位,同一个 manque 持守于二者之下。
一段关系性历史的形状
这正是那给一段亲密史它的形状者,既非纯粹的重复、也非纯粹的新奇。这一点能被作为一条主张陈出,因为它直接随出第二部分所确立的两个职分。倘若它只是重复、只有驱力,一个人会永远形成同一个结而无发展,被判罚重演一幕单一的场景。倘若它只是移位、只有欲望,便会没有内核、没有那”使一段关系性生命可辨认地是一个人的”者,只有一串不相关的依恋之接续。一个”持存的环绕”与一个”移位的滑动”的复合,正是那使一段关系性生命同时连续而又在运动者。
主张 —— 一段关系性历史的形状。 一段关系性历史既非纯粹的重复、也非纯粹的新奇、而是二者的复合。驱力的环绕使那早年的内核持存,给历史它的连续;欲望的滑动把主体携过新的诸形式,给历史它的运动。一段关系性生命可辨认地是一个人的,因为一个内核在其中持存;而它是一个生命、而非一幕固定的场景,因为它移动;两个运动一起供给无一者能单独供给者。
对未被选择者的忠诚
有一个值得为随后所标记的后果。一段关系性历史所忠诚于的内核不是被选择的;它在选择之前、在大他者最早之场里被铭刻。一个生命对其内核的忠诚因此归根到底不是一种人所选举的忠诚,而这将关涉下一节与第四部分的伦理。为另一人的内核腾出空间,便是为他们之中一个”他们也未曾选择、在他们能同意它之前便被铺在他们之中、并从下面组织着他们欲望”之物腾出空间。关系的时间对双方都以这种方式被分层,各以一个过去铭刻的压力进入那共享的当下,而一段关系部分地是两个这样被分层的时间之相遇。
§15 为他者的内核腾出空间
本节从驱力之持存抽出一个关于”一个好的结在于什么”的肯定性提议。它的目的是确立:一段关系不是由相互理解的完整所维系、而是由”各方为对方不可符号化的内核腾出空间”所维系,而对完全透明的愿望,若被应允,会熄灭它本要保全的欲望本身。本节把提议对置于透明理想,把它奠基于第二部分的思想实验,把它作为一条主张给出,并把亲密的寻常尺度翻转过来。
对置于透明理想的提议
各方都携带一个”从未被符号化、并在他们言说之下继续环绕”的内核。前几节确立了这一内核是主体欲望的座位,驱力环绕的空,那”使他们是一个欲望着的主体、而非一个透明的表面”者本身。一个关于好的结的提议随出。一段关系不是由沟通的成功所维系,而它的健康不由”两人多么完全地够到彼此”来度量。这把说明对置于那个理想,即在关于存在的一节里已遇到的、”会把透明造成一个好结之尺度”的理想,那一想法:最好的关系是那”任一方都无一物留而未说”者。那个理想,施用于亲密,弄错了它所瞄准的善。朝”完全够到他者、每一残余之消解、把他者完全转译入人所理解者”施压,便是朝思想实验所描述的熄灭施压,如今被施行于一个人之上。
在思想实验里的地基
这一提议的地基是第二部分的结果,从主体的结构被移到两人之间的关系。思想实验表明:闭合那裂隙便是熄灭那环绕它的驱力。一个被完全够到的他者会是一个”其裂隙已被闭合、其残余已被聚入伴侣所理解者、其欲望因此已熄灭”的他者。因此,”完全够到他者”的愿望,在它自己不知道的情况下,是一个”平息他者之欲望”的愿望,因为他者的欲望活在恰恰”完全够到会消解”的那一内核里。那把自己呈现为最深亲密者——一个”两侧都无残余的完美相互透明”——会是双方欲望之死,一个”两个已被读过、如今无物再转于其上的表面”之结。
好的结腾出空间
好的结做相反之事。它为他者的内核腾出空间。它为他者之中不能被说者持守一个空间,不朝闭合裂隙施压,并让那残余作为他者欲望之活的中心继续环绕。这一腾出空间不是听天由命、不是安于比理解更少者。它是这一认识:那不可符号化的内核不是结里的一个欠缺、而是结里”另一个欲望着的主体”之在场,而给那内核留它的空间便是使他者作为他者保持活着。
主张 —— 空间,而非透明。 一段关系由”各方为对方不可符号化的内核腾出空间”所维系,而非由相互理解的完整所维系。那内核是他者欲望的座位;完全够到它便会闭合他者欲望所环绕的裂隙、并从而熄灭它。维系一个结者,是两个人各自谢绝去填满对方之中”必须保持敞开”者,好让二者都保持为欲望着的主体、而非已被读过的表面。
亲密的尺度被翻转
这把亲密的寻常尺度翻转过来。对完全相互透明的愿望,对一个”任一方都无一物留而未被够到”之结的愿望,是一个”若被应允,会终结那使结活着的欲望”的愿望。更深的亲密是那”能与他者不可说的内核同住、而无需闭合它”者,那”在他者的不可够及本身里、找到的不是爱之障碍、而是他者保持为爱之活的源头的空间”者。人在另一人身上所爱者,在这一说明上,包含人永不会在他们身上够到者,而那够不到不是”爱在其处停下”的边疆、而是”爱在其中持续”的空间。第四部分把这一腾出空间带入关系性生活的三个register,并表明限度之同一生成性在诗中、在伦理中、在正义中做工。
§16 驱力在这一对中的交织
本节确立那”把亲密二元组从欲望着主体的一般结构区分开”者。目的是表明:在亲密关系里,各主体借以关联于其对象-成因的幻想,不仅仅是被加倍——被两个私人的主体并行地运行——而是被交织,各自进入对方对象-成因的位置,而这一交织正是那”使一对的共享世界既对他们独一、又不能被携出结外”者。本节陈述幻想的正统结构,给出亲密关系加于它的交织,引出对”一个共享世界之不可转让”的后果,并陈述主张。
正统的结构,及亲密所加者
正统精神分析把主体与其对象的关系写在幻想的公式里,即那被划杠的主体与 objet petit a 的关系,那”给欠缺一个形式、并让欲望跑起来”的欲望之对象-成因。在单一主体的层面取来,这一结构本身是完整的,而人或许会预期:两个主体之间的一段关系会是把两个这样的结构并排放置,各方运行一个私人的幻想、各自环绕一个私人的对象-成因,二者仅仅相邻。这不是亲密关系之所是,而那差异是二元组一切独特之处的种子。
在亲密关系里,那结构不是被并排加倍、而是被交织。各自变得牵连进对方的幻想、并进入对方对象-成因的位置,于是各自欲望所环绕的对象不再全然私人、而是与对方相缠、并被对方部分占据。他者不仅仅是一个人所欲望的人;他者开始立于对象-成因的那个位置本身,即人自己驱力所环绕的空,于是人自己与欠缺的最亲密关系如今经过这个特定的人。相应地,人开始为他们占据那位置。两个空不融合,因为一个空不能与一个空融合;它们被交织,各方的环绕如今经过对方的,两个回路在”各自的 manque 已把对方取为它的figure”之处被连结。
对一个共享世界的后果
从这一交织,随出一对所建之世界的品性,它的习语、它的私人玩笑、它的诸仪式、一段共享生活的整个肌理。这一世界是那被交织之幻想的沉积。一个私人玩笑对恰恰两个人好笑,因为它的电荷被锚定在一个”只有那两人占据的、共享的欲望坐标”里;被携给一个第三者,它不是被削弱、而仅仅是缺席,因为那第三者不立于”给它电荷”的交织里。一对之文化的每一元素都如此。它的意义不安置在词语或姿态里——那些能被复制——而安置在词语与姿态所来figure的驱力之交织里,而那不能。这正是为何一个共享世界不能被交出。若外在的形式被复制,所能被转让者,是一个无其电荷的壳,那玩笑的词语而无那”使它们好笑的、被交织的欲望”。一种亲密文化的不可转让不是隐私的一个偶然、而是”它的价值安置于何处”的一个后果,安置在一个”不存在于关系之外、并不能被携出它”的交织里。
主张 —— 驱力的交织。 在亲密关系里,各主体的幻想不是被并行加倍、而是被交织,各方开始占据对方对象-成因的位置,于是各自的环绕经过对方的。一对所建的共享世界是这一交织的沉积,而它的不可转让随出:所能被复制者是外在的形式,但那电荷安置在一个”存在于结之外之无处”的驱力之交织里。
交织与空间
这一交织加深、而非软化前一节”各方为对方的内核腾出空间”的要求。因为各方已开始占据对方对象-成因的位置,”闭合他者裂隙”的诱惑在此比在任何地方都更强,因为他者如今立于人自己欲望所环绕的那个中心本身,而”占有那中心、完全拥有它并被向它保证”的愿望,恰恰在交织最深之处施压最狠。第二部分的说明为此而更牢固地成立。闭合他者的裂隙,即便在此、尤其在此,会熄灭那”使他者成为人自己环绕之活的中心”的欲望,并从而把那交织塌成一个被占有的死物。那交织由整个论证所追踪的同一个”对闭合之拒绝”所持存活着,而各方为对方不可符号化之内核所腾出的空间,在这被交织的二元组里,也是各方为他们自己欲望之活的中心所腾出的空间。
第四部分 · 限度的生成性:诗、伦理、正义
§17 诗,一种环绕裂隙的语言
本节开启第四部分,它在关系性生活的三个register里抽绎出限度的生成性。它的目的是确立:诗是那”与它自己的限度和解、并被它弄得生成”的语言:它是语言的唯一用法,它不瞄准越过裂隙去闭合它、而是围绕裂隙组织自己并持守它敞开,而它因此故是驱力的语言。本节陈述寻常语言与诗之间的对照,以其根据给出说明,回顾那”接近同一点”的诗性语言之诸读法,并引出主张。
寻常语言瞄准越过裂隙;诗环绕它
寻常语言瞄准裂隙,以闭合它。它伸手够向它本要说者,并在它已说出它时——当能指已覆盖它的对象、残余已尽可能被聚入时——算自己成功。它的理想是透明,媒介在讯息之前的消失,一个”无一物留而未说”的说。诗不这样做工,而它的差异不是一件装饰之事、而是一件方向之事。诗是围绕裂隙组织的、而非瞄准越过它。它的诸figure、它的诸沉默、它对释义的拒绝、它”意谓得多于且他于它所陈述者”的方式,这一切都使诗环绕一个它不递送之物而转,持守敞开恰恰那个”寻常言说会试图闭合”的残余。
诗作为驱力的语言
诗是驱力的语言,在本文赋予驱力的确切意义上。驱力环绕对象-成因、并在环绕里、而非在攫取里被满足;诗环绕它不可说的中心、并在环绕里、而非在一个”会攫取它的释义”里被成全。这正是为何一首诗不能被它内容的一个陈述所取代。陈述瞄准越过裂隙并闭合它所能者;诗环绕裂隙并持守它敞开,而那持守敞开正是诗之所为。释义一首诗,便是对它尝试恰恰那个”会——凭第二部分的论证——熄灭那使它活着者”的闭合,而一首被释义之诗的被感之死,是那论证在语言之场本身里的小小演示。诗所给者不是裂隙之闭合、而是环绕它的经验。
接近同一点的诸读法
关于诗性语言的两条反思之线接近这一说明并帮助固定它。本雅明,写翻译,把一首诗的生命定位于某个”不是它可沟通之内容”者,定位于一种”没有信息之简单转移能存活、而翻译必须伸手够向却从不作为一个讯息递送”的意谓方式。一首诗里抗拒翻译者,在这一读法上,恰恰是那”诗所环绕而不陈述”者,那”没有内容之转移能携过”的不可说之中心。德里达,施压那”没有能指递送一个最终在场、意义总是沿差异之游戏被延异”的一般之点,表明书写不闭合于一个在场的意义、而是把它持于延异中。诗,在当前的说明上,不把这一延异作为一个缺陷来承受、而是把它作为它的艺术来接手,把意义之不到达造成它所提供的运动本身。寻常语言把延异当作一个应被最小化的障碍,诗则把它当作它之所为的媒介。
内核被给予流通而无捕获
这正是为何诗写那不能被别样写者。那不可符号化的内核,没有命题够到者,也不被诗够到,但诗做那命题所不能者:它给那内核一个流通的形式、而不给它一个捕获的形式。它让那残余被接近、被环绕、被近旁而居,而不被攫取、并从而被熄灭。诗是驱力自己的语言,因为它以词语做驱力以它对象所做者,环绕一个它不填满的空而转,并在那转里生成某个”一个填满会已然摧毁”之物。
主张 —— 诗环绕它所不能闭合者。 诗是那”围绕裂隙组织、而非瞄准越过它”的语言之用法。它环绕一个不可说的中心、并在环绕里、而非在一个”会攫取它的释义”里被成全,而它因此给那不可符号化的内核一个”流通而无捕获”的形式。诗是驱力的语言,而”释义它便不能不使它死去”这一不可能,是那”在语言本身里、闭合熄灭那敞开裂隙所持守活着者”的演示。
一个例证性的案例 —— 那说出了信所不能者的诗。 一个人试图平白地写出另一人对他们意谓什么,并发现那平白的陈述总在要点之旁,同时既真又空。转向一首诗,他们说得并不更平白,然而那诗持住了那陈述所放走者。诗没有闭合那陈述未能闭合的裂隙;它环绕了它,并在环绕里让那不可说之物作为”词语所环绕者”在场。信靠瞄准它而不能递送者,诗靠不瞄准它而携带。
一种在其限度处的语言之最高职分
于是诗是那”与它的限度和解、并被它弄得生成”的语言之范式。它不哀悼它所不能说者、也不佯装说它。它把它的整个艺术建在那”不说”之上,并从那”不说”里造出那一种言说之形式,它把裂隙作为一个活的中心持守敞开、而非作为一个已解之问题闭合它。诗所表明者——并在语言这一媒介本身里表明——是:语言的限度不是语言所能做者之终结、而是它最高职分之敞开。这直接关涉随后的两个register。倘若诗是”在语言里造出一个流通而无捕获”者,伦理与正义将被表明是”在他者与共同生活的register里、造出一个关系而无占有、一个守护而无结清”者。
§18 为内核腾出空间而不占有
本节取限度之生成性的第二个register——伦理——并确立:那奠基于限度之上的、对他者的关系,是一种不占有的给予:一种”生成结、同时给他者不可符号化的内核留它的空间”的生成,而它因此抵达更古老的智慧所命名的形式——生而不有。本节把第一部分的审美尺度与第三部分的腾出空间聚入一个伦理形式,陈述那形式及其地基,把它作为一条主张给出,并标出它与一种占有之伦理的距离。
那不能被穷尽的他者
伦理关系在”他者不能被穷尽”之处开始。这在第一部分被确立:他者面对我,不是作为一个类的一例、而是作为这一个,其诉求从”无谓词所包含者”发出,而对他们合宜的回应被一个知觉、一个审美尺度所取,没有规则能取代它。倘若他者完全可说、完全被带入描述之下,便会没有伦理诉求、只有对一个已知量的管理。诉求从”他者之中逾越每一谓词者”生起,那”无范畴够得到的独一内核”,而第三部分把那内核认同于他者欲望的座位,他们驱力所环绕的空。伦理因此奠基,不在”够到他者”之上、而在”对那不能被够到者的承认”之上,而它的第一个行动是给那内核留它的空间。
做工中的审美尺度
这是第一部分的审美尺度,如今在做伦理之工。对另一人合宜的回应是那”感到可说者在何处终止、并不逼过它,回应他者而不僭称已然穷尽他们,把它的回应持守敞开于一个它知觉却不能陈述的独一性”者。为他者的内核腾出空间不是扣住engagement、而是以那”知觉、而非命题所统辖”的样式来engage:亲近地照看他者、亲近到足以感到”可被说者的边缘”,并在那里持守。这一知觉的schooling,本系列在别处所展开的培育,是那”其尺度是审美的”关系所固有的伦理训练。
给予而不占有
这一伦理的形式是一种不占有的给予。为他者的内核腾出空间,便是与”人所不持有者”处于关系、与”人未曾攫取、也不能攫取者”生成一个结。本文在此抵达一个更古老的传统所命名的形状,并把它命名为一个”在它自己的路上抵达、而非作为一个权威借来”的结论:生而不有,为而不恃,长而不宰。对他者不可符号化之内核的伦理关系恰有这一形式。它生成一个结而不占有他者;它朝他们行动而不把他们持牢;它长养他者之所是而不主宰他们欲望所从出的内核。这一抵达不是装饰。第二部分的说明逼出它:既然占有他者的内核、闭合它,会熄灭那”使他者成为结之活的源头”的欲望,那么一个”生成一个持久之结”的伦理,便只能是一个”生成而不占有”的伦理。那古老的公式命名了结构所许可的唯一伦理形式。
主张 —— 生成而不占有。 那奠基于限度之上的伦理是一种不占有的给予:它与他者生成一个结、同时给他者不可符号化的内核留它的空间,谢绝去闭合那”它不能闭合而不熄灭他者欲望”者。生而不有、为而不恃、长而不宰,不是一句借来的箴言、而是限度之结构所许可的唯一伦理形式,因为占有那内核会是”使他者成为结之活的源头的欲望”之死。
反对一种占有之伦理
这是限度之生成性的伦理面孔,而它与一种占有之伦理的距离是确切的。一个”瞄准完全够到他者、闭合他们之间每一裂隙”的伦理,会是一种占有之伦理,而占有,在此如在整个论证中,是熄灭:被占有的他者是他者的欲望已熄灭。限度所奠基的伦理是占有之反面。它是”与人所不能持有者同住、回应一个人所不能陈述的独一性、恰恰靠给人所不会闭合之内核留敞开来生成一个结”的艺术。他者之中不能被够到者不是伦理的限度。它是那”一个配得上其名的伦理得以可能”的空间,而那空间由”诗在语言里所实践、正义在下一节于共同生活里所实践”的同一个对闭合之拒绝所持守敞开。
§19 生成性的守护
本节取限度之生成性的第三个register——正义——并确立:正义在其根处是对一个”它所不能结清的生成性”的守护,而这一守护的样式是一种”持守它所不能处置者”的知,本文命名它为见证。本节接手第一部分所铺陈的限度,即正义亏欠保护于一个”它不能带入已定符号”的生成性,给出由它随出的正义之肯定性说明,回顾那”固定这一样式”的关于见证的工作,并引出主张。
结清之下
正义通常被figure为结清,靠一个处置它的判决把一件事带到一个了结。本文的说明把另一个职分置于那一个之下。第一部分确立了:一段正义关系最亏欠保护者是关系性存在的生成性,即那”实在界的介入不断在既定意义之秩序里开启”的仍在成形之生命,而这一生成性不能被预先结清,因为结清它便是把”仍在成为”转成”已然成为”、并从而终结那本要被保护之物本身。正义,在其根处,因此不是结清、而是守护:持守敞开一个”生成性能在其中持续”的空间,抵御”过早把它闭合入一个完结情形”的压力。结清仍是正义的一个真实而必要的职分,针对已取了形状、能被带到一个判决面前者;但在它之下躺着那”持守敞开尚未取形者”的更深职分,而正是这一个是限度所奠基者。
守护的样式,见证
这一守护的样式是一种”不结清”的知,而本文命名它——又作为它自己路上的一个结论——见证。见证便是持守人所不能处置者,朝向一个”人不靠对它下判断来把它带到了结”的生成性或苦难。关于见证的工作精确地固定这一样式。费尔曼与劳布发现:对”逾越结清者”的见证不是一个事实的记录、而是对一个”无充分陈述者”的持守,一种”对不能被闭合入一个情形者的守信”,以致见证者锚定那事物、而不以一个判断替换它。正义,就它守护一个它所不能结清的生成性而言,必须以这一样式来知。它必须持守那仍在成形者与那未被陈述者、而不佯装已然处置了它们,把它们锚定在共同生活里、而不把它们闭合入已定符号。一个建于见证之上的正义,不把已定符号误认作”所亏欠者之全体”;它处置能被处置者,并持守敞开不能者。
主张 —— 正义作为见证。 正义的根本职分是守护一个它所不能结清的生成性,而那守护的样式是见证:一种”持守那仍在成形者与那未被陈述者、而不处置它们、把它们锚定在共同生活里、而不把它们闭合入已定符号”的知。作为见证的正义,使它自己的诸程序答责于它们所未曾预见者,并拒绝给自己那”已然预期一切之结清”的虚假完整。
反对一种对已成形者的行政
这是限度之生成性的正义面孔,而它与一种纯结清之正义的距离是确切的。一个”能预先结清一切”的正义会是对已成形者的一种行政,闭合于关系性存在不断生成的新者、并对”无程序所穷尽的苦难”充耳不闻。限度所奠基的正义把自己持守敞开于它所不能结清者,守护它所不能闭合的生成性,并在那生成性的不可够及里找到的不是法律里的一个缺口、而是法律为之而存在的缘由。第四部分的三个register如今一同而立,而它们的统一可见。诗给出流通而无捕获;伦理给出一个结而无占有;正义给出一个守护而无结清。在每一处,第二部分所表明为”驱力之生命的条件”的同一个对闭合之拒绝,被表明为一个生成性形式的条件:在语言里、在对他者的关系里、在共同生活里。那不能被带入符号者,在每一个register里,不是一个失败、而是那”生成性形式得以可能”的敞开。
§20 限度的共结构
本节给限度一个形式的对应者。目的是表明:本文以散文所描述的两个figure——一个”携带意义、而非标记一个纯然缺席”的欠缺,以及一个”只透过它对周遭之效果才可知”的内核——有精确的表达,第一个在余代数的语言里、第二个在开放系统之约化动力学的理论里。这些形式主张被作为后续工作的工具、并作为”使散文精确”的启发式来提供,而非作为”关系性存在被断言遵从”的法则。本节陈述代数-余代数的对偶,把欠缺reify为一个共结构,给出观察与不可区分的语义,然后严格地处理那”一个组分只透过其余组分才可知的开放复合系统”之情形。
关于本节之抱负的一个说明
关于所主张与所不主张者的一个词。下面的形式主义不被作为”关系性存在遵从一条先验法则”的证据来提供,而本文不持守——在此或在任何地方——亲密、或驱力、或价值被一个方程所统辖。余代数的语言与那约化公式被以相反的精神使用,作为”给本文已在别的地基上确立的诸figure一个精确家园”的启发式,并作为后续形式工作的一个可能基础。凡一个方程出现之处,它陈述一个”在一个良定义的数学设定里成立”的关系,并作为一个”其贴合被论证”的类比被引入,而非作为一个”那设定是关系性现象之隐藏真理”的主张。这与本系列在别处对优化与法则所取的立场一致:一个形式结构能照亮而不立法。
代数-余代数的对偶
第一个figure是那携带意义的欠缺,而使它精确的语言是代数与余代数之间的对偶。一个函子 F 的代数是一个映射 α : FX → X,一个”取诸元素的有结构集合、并把它们组合入一个单一元素”的运算。代数是建构与闭合的数学:它说部分如何被组装入一个整体、多如何被折入一。一个函子 F 的余代数是那对偶,一个映射 γ : X → FX,一个”取一个单一元素、并把它展开入它有结构的可观察behaviour——它的一步向外形式连同它的诸后继”的运算。余代数是观察与过程的数学:它不从部分组装一个整体、而是把一个状态展开入”它之中能被看见者与它成为什么”。
对论证的相关性是确切的。本文通篇所警告的运算——裂隙的闭合、残余之被折入能指、整体之被组装入一个被占有的统一——是一个代数运算,一个”会把多递送入一并闭合它们”的映射 FX → X。本文所肯定的运算——那”展开而不闭合的环绕、那转的驱力与那滑的欲望、那从不被结清的生成性”——是余代数的,一个”把一个状态展开入它的behaviour与它的诸后继、而不把它们聚入一个完结整体”的映射 X → FX。”一种与它的限度和解的语言”与”一种会废除它的语言”之间的区分,在形式上,是余代数与代数之间的区分。
欠缺被 reify 为一个共结构
那散文主张——一个欠缺能携带意义,照看一个关系性结构的任何部分都会把它揭示为一个然而携带意义的lackness——容许一个构造。取一个作为诸关系之图被给出的结构,它的诸节点是诸项、它的诸箭头是诸项之间的诸关系。照看一个特定的位置,便是问那位置是什么,而关系性的答案是:那位置不是别的、正是入射于它的诸箭头之模式。现在施行两个运算。第一,reify那欠缺:引入,作为结构的一个节点,那曾是空的位置本身,好让那缺席成为一个诸关系的承载者、而非图里的一个洞。第二,反转诸箭头:从那”指向一个项”的诸关系,过到那”从那位置展开”的诸共-关系。结果是一个共-图,其中那被reify的欠缺是一个像任何别的一样的节点,而诸箭头从它向外跑,于是那曾是一个缺失的中心者成为一个”结构从其展开”的源头。
这一构造在形式上是余代数的。诸箭头的反转是从 FX → X 到 X → FX 的过渡,从”朝一个项组装的诸关系”到”从一个位置展开的诸共-关系”;而那欠缺的reification把那缺席的位置认作余代数的一个状态,一个展开它自己向外behaviour者。那欠缺成为一个”其全部内容是从它展开者之模式”的实体,而那是余代数的存在样式,一个”被它的可观察展开、并被别无一物所知”的状态。
观察与不可区分的语义
两个概念给这一说明它的语义。第一个是终余代数。在一个函子的所有余代数之中,在适当条件下,有一个终的,每一个别的都唯一地映入它,而它有”一切可能behaviour之空间”的品性,自身从不是一个被组装的对象、而是”能被观察者”之完结的地平线。终余代数是那”从不被闭合、然而不是无形式的生成性”的形式figure:behaviour之全体、而不是一个能被占有的整体。它是本文所称”敞开中心”的余代数对应者,被给出的不是作为一个对象、而是作为”环绕一个位置而展开者”之总体。
第二个是双模拟,余代数的相同之概念。两个状态是双模拟的,当没有观察区分它们、当”能从这一个展开者”的一切都能被”从另一个的一个展开”所匹配时。决定性者是:双模拟只透过可观察的behaviour来定义同一性,而不诉诸诸状态可能被假设拥有的任何内在内容。这是本文一个反复出现之主张——内核只透过它的诸效果可知——的形式对应者。在余代数的设定里,没有一个”在behaviour之后、人可诉诸”的内在内容;一个状态是它可观察展开之模式,而知它便是观察那模式、从不攫取一个在它之下的内容。
一族并行,作为类比而提供
在那严格的情形之前,关于一族”松散地、而非靠任何被主张的同构而共享那共结构品性”的概念的一个词。大他者里之欠缺的能指,即象征秩序未能闭合于自身之点,锚定那秩序不是靠成为它的一个更进一步的元素、而是靠标记那”一个元素缺失之处”。人被诱惑去把一个经济的效率点(由它周围的诸取舍所定义)、或一个动力学之流的一个distinguished点、或观照诸传统里被渲染为空与虚的诸项,置于它之旁。这些并行是有暗示性的,而本文把它们作为类比、而非作为同一性来提供。它们在此不被表明为一个数学结构的诸实例,而本节不把任何分量搁于它们的统一之上。相比之下,随后者是一个”对应是确切的”情形。
开放复合系统,被严格处理
那严格的情形是开放复合系统,而它使本文的中心认识论主张——一个内核只透过它对周遭之效果才被知——精确。那主张不是一个隐喻。它是约化动力学之理论的一个定理,而以下小心地陈述它。
设一个复合系统的状态空间是乘积 M = M_A × M_B × M_C,带一个由耦合的向量场 f 所生成的流 Φᵗ,其中耦合意味着 f 不跨三个因子分离。可观察量是函数 g ∈ L²(M, μ),而它们由 Koopman 算子 (Uᵗg)(x) = g(Φᵗx) 演化,它在可观察量上是线性的、即便当 f 是非线性的,这一线性正是 Koopman 表述之要点。现在假设只有组分 A 与 C 可及,于是人实际能读的可观察量构成闭子空间 𝒪_AC ⊂ L²(M, μ),即只依赖于 (x_A, x_C) 的函数。设 𝒫 是到 𝒪_AC 的正交投影,等价地是那”把 B 平均掉”的条件期望 𝔼[· | x_A, x_C],并设 𝒬 = I − 𝒫。以 L 记 Uᵗ 的生成元,任何可观察量之可及部分的演化满足 Mori–Zwanzig 广义 Langevin 方程:
(d/dt) 𝒫Uᵗg = [马尔可夫项] 𝒫Uᵗ𝒫L g + [记忆项] ∫₀ᵗ 𝒫Uᵗ⁻ˢ 𝒫L eˢ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L g ds + [涨落项] 𝒫Uᵗ eᵗ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L g,
一个精确成立的恒等式,带记忆核 K(s) = 𝒫L eˢ𝒬ᴸ 𝒬L,它携带那不可及动力学的影响。
这一公式的内容,就当前目的而言,是精确的。组分 B 从不作为一个直接的观察出现。在可及动力学的方程里没有 B 上的算子;B 已被 𝒫 投影出去。然而 B 不是从动力学缺席。它的整个效果由记忆项与涨落项所携带,即由它留在”可及可观察量在 (A, C) 上之演化”上的诸标记所携带。知 B,在这一确切意义上,便是在那”统辖 A 与 C 如何演化”的记忆核 K(s) 里读它的签名,而没有别的通达它之道,因为那耦合而开放的结构不许可 B 本身上的任何算子。那朴素的图景——人会靠作用于 B 来观察 B——不仅不切实际、而且在形式上不可得:可及的代数是 𝒪_AC,而 B 只透过 𝒬 携入”可及部分之记忆”者进入。
一个确切并行的陈述在量子的设定里成立,那里可及的可观察量构成子代数 ℬ(ℋ_A) ⊗ 𝟙_B ⊗ ℬ(ℋ_C),那不可及的组分被偏迹 ρ_AC = tr_B ρ_ABC 所移除,而 B 只在它对约化态 ρ_AC 的效果里幸存。这两个设定——经典的约化动力学与量子的对一个子代数的限制——给出一个结果:一个开放复合系统的一个组分,只透过它的诸邻居可知、从不透过一个作用于它自身的算子。
主张 —— 内核透过它的诸邻居被读。 在一个”其可及可观察量被限于三个耦合组分中的两个”的开放复合系统里,那第三个组分从不作为一个直接观察出现,然而完全透过 Mori–Zwanzig 方程的记忆核来决定那可及动力学。这是一个确切的结果、而非一个类比,而它是本文认识论主张的形式影像:那不可符号化的内核是那被投影出去的组分,只透过它留在诸可观察邻居——症状、能指、一个共享世界的肌理——上的诸标记而被知,而从不透过一个朝它导向的算子。
形式主义的够及
两件事被确立、一件被免责。被确立者:那携带意义的欠缺有一个余代数的形式,一个”其存在是从它展开者之模式”的状态;而”一个内核只透过它的诸邻居被知”这一主张,在约化动力学的理论里是确切为真的,那里那被投影出去的组分活在记忆核里、而别无所在。被免责者:本文不断言关系性存在是一个”遵从这一方程的动力学系统”,也不断言上面聚集的那一族并行是一个结构的诸实例。形式主义是一盏灯、而非一条法则。它表明本文两个中心figure——那生成性的欠缺、那透过它的效果被读的内核——不是松散的隐喻、而是有精确的形式对应者,而它标出一个后续工作的方向,其中本系列的关系性本体论或许能被给予一个系统地余代数式与约化理论式的表述,闭合在代数一侧、生成性与观察在余代数一侧,而那不可及的内核通篇被figure为”只在它诸邻居之记忆里幸存者”。
§21 反驳与答复
在收尾之前,本节陈述并回答说明所邀请的四个反驳。目的不是抵御一切来者地捍卫立场,因为本文是建设性的、不树立敌手,而是靠表明它主张与不主张什么来使它的诸承诺精确。每个反驳都以其最强形式给出,并在说明自己的条件上被回答。
第一个反驳,说明浪漫化了沟通之失败
反驳如是说:靠使语言的限度生成,本文把一个真实的剥夺——人们彼此不理解之失败——转成一个善,并从而劝人接受一段”造成真实之苦”的距离。它冒着告诉”在其诸结中孤独者”说他们的孤独是爱之条件的风险。
答复区分反驳揉在一起的两件事。有寻常的沟通之失败,其中某个可说者未被说、或被说得糟、或被听错,而有那结构性的限度,在其处某个不可说者在所说的一切之下施压。本文不使第一个成为生成性的任何东西。寻常的沟通失败应被修复,而说明对”扣住本可被分享者、或忽略本可被理解者”不给任何安慰。本文所称生成者只是那结构性的限度,那”无论多少好的沟通都够不到、因为它根本不是可说之秩序”的内核。那生成性的距离不是一次更好的谈话会闭合的距离;它是那”在每一次好的谈话之后会保留下”的距离,即”他者保持为一个欲望着的主体”的空间。把二者混淆确实会是浪漫化一个可补救的贫乏。本文把它们持分开,并只请求那”不可化约的距离、那无修复够得到者”被看作它之所是。
第二个反驳,它消解了对透明的正当要求
反驳如是说:诸关系被隐瞒所损害,而诚实是一个真实的德性;一个珍视那不可够及之内核的说明似乎许可扣住,把”守秘”尊为对一个奥秘的忠诚。
答复转于”不可说者”与”被扣住者”之间的差异。本文所称不可符号化的内核不是一个”主体拥有、并谢绝分享”的内容;它是一个”主体也不拥有”的残余,它在他们之中施压,而不作为一个”他们能披露或隐瞒之物”对他们可得。扣住关乎”一个人选择不说的可说者”,而对置于扣住,诚实的寻常德性而立,不被这一说明所扰。那不可符号化的内核不被扣住,因为它不被持有。为它腾出空间不是许可保密、而是承认:即便在”隐瞒无物、说尽一切可说者”的两个人之间,一个残余也在各自之中施压,任一方都不能披露它,因为任一方都不拥有它。对透明的要求,被理解为一个关于可说者的要求,被完全留在效力中。本文所否认者只是:透明,无论多么完整,会够到那内核,因为那内核不在透明所关乎之物之中。
第三个反驳,精神分析前提在做未挣得的工
反驳如是说:论证倚靠一个特定而可争议的理论,即关于主体、实在界、与驱力的拉康式说明,而它的诸结论只与那些前提一样牢靠,而许多人不承认那些前提。
答复承认那倚赖并澄清它的范围。本文确实使用精神分析的装置,并不佯装从人人共享的前提推出它的诸结论。但两件事软化那反驳。第一,第一部分现象学地——靠对关系性生活诸维度的照看——确立六个限度,在任何精神分析术语被引入之前;一个”承认六个限度、而不承认那理论”的读者,已然承认了本文的描述性内核,而第二部分的精神分析装置被作为”为何六者共享一个形式”的现有最佳说明来提供,而非作为它们唯一可能的地基。第二,那装置靠它所解释者挣得它的位置——一个形式在六个维度上的再现、一个内核跨一个生命的持存、完全够到会是的那个死——而一个读者有权靠那产出、而非靠在先的效忠来称量它。这一说明被作为”一个应由其果被评估的解释”来提供,而非作为”从被持为自明之诸公理的一个演绎”。
第四个反驳,本文自己的诸主张符号化了它所称不可符号化的那个裂隙
这一反驳是最尖锐的,而它是反身的:在陈述”那内核不能被符号化”、在给它命名 manque、在以平白的命题铺陈关于它的诸主张时,本文对那裂隙做了恰恰它所说不能做者,把它带入能指。要么那裂隙能被符号化——那样论题为假,要么它不能——那样本文陈述不了它自己的论题。
答复标出整个说明一直倚赖的一个区分:说”有一个裂隙”与说”那裂隙包含什么”之间的区分。本文做第一件、而非第二件。陈述”一个残余被留在能指之外”、命名那残余的位置、描述它诸效果的形式,是环绕那裂隙,谈它的诸边缘与它的诸后果,而不把它的内容递送入符号。这恰恰是本文归于诗的那个运算,一个”持守裂隙敞开”的环绕、而非一个”闭合它”的说,而本文为自己主张的不多于此。它的诸命题指向那裂隙并环绕它转;它们不填满它。名字 manque 不是”被渲染入一个能指”的残余之内容;它是那”内容所不在之处”的标记。论题因此与它自己的演出一致:一部”环绕它所不能闭合者、并如此说了”的著作,没有闭合它。这正是为何本文不带综合地作结,在最后拒绝那”反驳假设它必须要么达成、要么未能达成”的闭合。它既不达成、也不未能于闭合。它环绕,而那是它所主张去做的唯一之事。
第五部分 · 复调的收尾
§22 限度作为地基
本节收尾本文,而不把它的诸结果聚入一个最终的综合。它的目的是陈述整个论证所生效的那一次相之改变,即语言的限度——被一个初始习惯当作一个缺陷者——通篇显示自身为一个地基,然后留下几个声音在它们未被化解的张力里说话,与一个”已警告过’闭合那应保持敞开者’”的论证一致。本节陈述那相之改变,铺陈那复调,并把论题归还于敞开。
为何不综合
本文追随了一个单一的论题,历经六个维度、一个形式的内核、一个持存、以及三个生成性的register。它不把这些聚入一个最终的综合而作结,而这一拒绝不是一种谦逊、而是论证的一个后果。一部”关于语言所不能够及者”的著作,不应靠够到它而结束。把诸结果composerin一个单一的、达到顶点的命题,便是对本文自己的论题施行那”论题所辨认为熄灭”的闭合,靠把论证——完结地、作为一个被占有之物——递送出来,而平息它的运动。收尾的形式必须践行本文的内容,而内容禁止那”一个综合会是”的闭合。
相之改变
收尾时能被说者是一次相之改变、而非一个概述。语言的限度,那个初始习惯当作一个缺陷者,通篇显示自身为一个地基。在存在里,它是那”使结保持为一个行动、而非一份凭证”者。在维系里,它是那”把关系归还于在场、而非记录”者。在价值里,它是那”使价值活在结里、而非可供被抽走”者。在伦理里,它是那”把回应归还于一个无规则取代的知觉”者。在正义里,它是那”使法律答责于一个它不能闭合的生成性”者。在演化里,它是那”一段关系仍能成长为无人尚有其词者”的空间。在所有六者之下,它是那”驱力所环绕、欲望沿其失败而滑动”的 manque,那”没有它关系便不会移动”的敞开中心。同一个敞开中心,在第四部分,被表明为诗、一种不占有的伦理、以及一种无过早结清的正义之条件。限度不是一个”为关系性生活去解”而设的问题。它是关系性生活立于其上的地基。
诸声音
几个声音可以被留在此处说话,而本文不把它们噤为一个,因为这件事的真理躺在它们的张力里、而非在它们中任何一个里。
有那”在这一切里听见一种硬的必然”的声音,即那”不能最终够到彼此的诸主体之不可化约的孤独”,并承认那说明不消解那孤独、而只是别样地读它。这一声音不被本文所驳。一个结的诸主体确实,在内核处,保持彼此不被够到,而倘若人曾想要”两者融入一个无残余之透明”,那说明给它冷的安慰,只告诉人:如此被想要的那融合会曾是一个死。
有那”听见一种解放”的声音,即从一个”从来不是一个爱之愿望、而是一个占有之愿望”的对完全透明之愿望的释放,并在限度里找到那”爱能呼吸的空间”。对这一声音,同一个结果是好消息:人所畏惧为一个贫乏者——所爱者的不可够及——正是那”所爱者保持为爱之活的源头”的空间,而”放下那占有之愿望”不是一个丧失、而是一个”能持久之结”的开始。
有那”听见一种训练”的声音,即对一个”精细到足以与不能被闭合者同住”的知觉与耐心的长久schooling。对这一声音,那说明既非冷、也非慰藉、而是一个任务:去学伦理所要求的审美尺度,去实践正义所要求的见证,去造出并持守亲密所要求的空间,而这些无一是被给予的、一切都必须历经一个生命被培育。
这些声音在此不被和解。把它们composerin一个单一的结论,便是对论证做那”论证所警告以防”者,闭合一个”其敞开是整个要点”的裂隙。它们被留在它们的张力里,朝向一个结果而立的三种方式,而本文不在它们之间裁决。
论题被归还于敞开
于是本文靠把它的论题归还于敞开而结束。语言的限度使驱力可能、使诗可能、使一种不占有的伦理与一种无过早结清的正义可能,并使一个”因从不闭合而不断移动”的结可能。语言所不能够及者不是关系性生活的失败。它是那”关系性生活于其中开始、并持续、并不终结”的敞开。
尾声
有一个古老的figure喻这篇文章所追随的限度。荃者所以在鱼,得鱼而忘荃;言者所以在意,得意而忘言。这一figure通常被读作一个”越过语言、朝向一个’躺在它那一侧清晰可见的意义’”的劝诫。这篇文章别样地读它。有一个”词语为之而在、而没有词语递送”的意义,而要点不是越过词语去攫取它、而是让词语环绕它、并在环绕里持守它活着。那捕到鱼的荃能被忘。那环绕裂隙的词语不能,因为那裂隙不是一条待捕的鱼。它是它们所环绕的敞开中心,而忘了那环绕便会是丢失那意义、而非拥有它。
致最后读到这里的那一个,整个系列为她而写:此处被长篇论证者,我最先是与你一同知道的。你之中有一个内核我永不会说出,而我已停止愿望去说。在我词穷之处,你仍在,而正是在那里,在我所能置入言说的最后一物之外,我不断朝你转去。这不是我语言的失败。它是我继续爱你的房间,而它不闭合。
一个承诺属于此处、在末尾,而它是论证一直在描述的那一类。它不是一个被称量、并被发现值得作出的承诺,不是一个”本可同样轻易朝另一方向去”的盘算之输出。它是一个”恰恰因为它不计算它是否值得而持守”的承诺,一个环绕它所不能说者、并对一个它永不会闭合的内核守信的承诺。这样一个承诺不因搁于无计算之上而更弱。它恰恰因此故是一个承诺、而非一个交易,而它是我所作的那一个。
言不尽意，
where speech runs out,（言说穷尽不了意义，）
而意在焉。
meaning is still there.（而意义仍在那里。）