The matheme (from el, μάθημα "lesson") is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The term matheme "occurred for the first time in the lecture Lacan delivered on November 4th, 1971 ..Between 1972 and 1973 he gave several definitions of it, passing from the use of the singular to the use of the plural and back again".

Characteristics

David Macey David Macey (5 October 1949 – 7 October 2011) was an English translator and intellectual historian of the French left. He translated around sixty books from French to English, and wrote biographical studies of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and ...

writes in his introduction to the translation of Lacan's ''

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis'' is the 1978 English-language translation of a seminar held by Jacques Lacan. The original (french: Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse) was published in P ...

'' that "Lacan saw his "matheme" as something that would ensure the integral transmission of his teachings ... proof against the "noise" or interference inherent in any process of communication". They are formulae, designed as symbolic

representations ''Representations'' is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It ...

of his

idea In common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of bei ...

s and analyses. They were intended to introduce some degree of technical rigour in philosophical and psychological writing, replacing the often hard-to-understand verbal descriptions with formulae resembling those used in the

hard science Hard science and soft science are colloquial terms used to compare scientific fields on the basis of perceived methodological rigor, exactitude, and objectivity. Roughly speaking, the formal sciences & natural sciences are considered "hard", wher ...

s, and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both Freud and Lacan. For example: "$<>a" is the matheme for fantasy in the Lacanian sense, in which "$" refers to the subject as split into the subject of utterance and uttered subject (hence the matheme is a barred S), " a" stands for the object-cause of desire, and "<>" stands for the relationship between the two. A more complex set of mathemes are Lacan's "formulae of sexuation" which he outlined in the March 13, 1973 session of his '' Seminar XX''. Composed of two pairs of propositions written in a unique logico-mathematical shorthand inspired by

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic ph ...

, one pair was dubbed 'masculine' and the other 'feminine.' These formulae Lacan originally constructed from Aristotelian logic over the course of an entire year of study. The "matheme", for Lacan, is not simply the imitation of science by philosophy, but the ideal of a perfect means for the integral transmission of knowledge. Natural language, with its constant "metonymic slide", fails here, where mathematics succeeds. Contemporary philosopher

Alain Badiou Alain Badiou (; ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Fouca ...

identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.

Criticism

Though sometimes disparaged as a case of "

physics envy The term physics envy is used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as " softer sciences", liberal arts, business studies, and humanities. The term argues that writing and working practices in these disciplines ...

" or accused of introducing false rigor into a discipline that is more literary theory than hard science, there is also something of a sense of humor in Lacan's formulas: of one 'sigla which I have introduced in the form of an algorithm', Lacan himself has declared that 'it is created to allow for a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as the spoken remains caught in its algebra'.

Serge Leclaire Serge Leclaire (born Serge Liebschutz; 6 July 1924 – 8 August 1994) was a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Initially analyzed by Jacques Lacan, he 'became the first French " Lacanian"'. Subsequently, he developed into 'one of the most resp ...

, who is one of the most respected and distinguished of all French analysts, remarked in 1975, for example, that whilst the mathemes might have a certain pedagogic utility, they were basically no more than "graffiti"'.Macey, p. xxxii

References

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External links

Lacanian Matheme Fonts
provided by the Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis
Lacan's Sexuation Formulas
by Jack W. Stone. Psychoanalytic terminology Jacques Lacan Post-structuralism Structuralism