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Lacan and Topology by Bruno de Florence on October 8, 2011

The use of Topology by Lacan has baffled many of his readers, most especially those with no background in Maths. Lacan himself did not help as what he presented was his own version of Topology, just as he did with Logic. It is only in Seminar 12 (1964-1965) that he extensively presents and explains his approach to Topology, while up until then, only the word itself had been mentioned here and there. Throughout that seminar, the topological figures used to represent the non-linearity which characterises Freuds description of the psychical apparatus are the Moebius strip, the Klein bottle and the Cross-cap. Those figures have now become emblematic inside the Lacanian psychoanalytical community. Almost 10 years later, in Seminar 20 (1972-1973), Lacan presented a figure which has now become the icon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Borromean knot. Nowadays, good quality graphics and videos of those figures can very easily be found on the Internet, notably on Youtube, thus assisting first time readers in coming to grip with Lacans elaborations, most especially those who have no direct experience of psychoanalysis. Although they may not seem to be any connection between Topology and psychoanalysis, it is worth pointing out that Topology can be used in other non-mathematical areas as a pedagogical tool, as well as as a creative tool. As a composer and a musicologist, I was able to use it as a framework for composition, and as a musical analysis framework for some of Bachs pieces, showing that Canon 2 from The Musical Offering could be accounted for as a simultaneous double walk along a moebius strip. Lacan considered the use of Maths in general as important, since a mathematical equation (such as E=mc2) is a letter superimposed on the real, that act producing knowledge about the real, even though the real cannot entirely be knowledgised. It also minimises the ambiguity inherent to metonymy, while at the same time allowing for further interpretation and elaboration. This knowledge remains imaginary, an

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imago (the latin word for image), something which stands for something else. It is all in the eye of the beholder. Can Topology be considered as a metaphor in its use in psychoanalysis? Lacan at first says no, then in his typical fashion of saying the same thing and its opposite, from one year to the next, or within the same seminar, says yes: the efforts I am making to bring you a topology are to account (my Italics) for a form to allows us to conceive of these anomalies which are ours, concerning those problems of inside and outside (Seminar 13, 8 June 1966). So Topology is and is not a metaphor! This statement is more logically consistent than appears at first, if you place it on a moebius strip, that is inside a non-Euclidian logic, where the principle of non-contradiction is not part of the initial axioms. Charles Peirce had elaborated such a logic, which he called Logic of the vague. Nowadays, it would be called Fuzzy Logic. Lacan then asks a rhetorical question: does an analyst need to learn Topology in order to practice analysis? That is not the question, is his reply, for a topological object is what he will be dealing in his daily practice, and if his topology is all wrong, it will be at the expense of his patient. Is the use of Topology by Lacan justified? My answer is a definite Yes, as per the Freudian text. First, Freud conceives the Ego as a surface, which therefore participates of both the outside and the inside of the psychical system. Second, in his 1916 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud says than an idea can have the property (my Italics) of being conscious or unconscious, while saying in The Interpretation of Dreams that the conscious and the unconscious are locations (my Italics) between which ideas circulate. And precisely, the mathematical definition of Topology is the mathematical study of the properties that are preserved through deformations, twistings, and stretchings of objects. For instance, a stretched circle is topologically equivalent to an ellipse. Another exemple is if you remove a point from a circle, you obtain a line. More generally, Topology is the study of the properties of an object when a transformation has been applied to it. Do they remain the same, that is are they invariant, or not? Thus, if an idea goes from one location (the conscious) to another (the unconscious), Topology allows us to ask what happens to its properties.

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Here is a video example of how the Moebius strip can account for a surface being both an inside and an outside. Its main characteristic is that, in Mathematics language, it is non-orientable, that it cannot be decided if it is left or right orientated. [video] http://youtu.be/Eb-Fi8GI6PE [/video] You should really go through the experience of making a Moebius strip and slide your finger along it to see what happens. You can follow the practical steps given in this video: [video] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNtKcK27x1s [/video] Note that a Moebius strip can have any number of twists, not just 1, providing the number of twists is odd. Lets see now how we can use Topology to account for some of the Freudian and Lacanian categories. A comment made by Chris Oakley during a session of the Lacanian Forum Reading Group on Seminar 10 had led me to surmise that the foetus, upon birth, goes from one topology to another, and that this could for account for the fact that the act of birth, as the individuals first experience of anxiety, has given the affect of anxiety certain characteristic forms of expression (Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety 1926). Initially, we can say that the foetus is inside a sphere. Nutrients and oxygen are brought directly into his blood stream, he does not have to breath and does not have to ingest and masticate food. Upon birth, that is at the moment when he has completely exited the mothers womb, the autonomous respiratory system kicks in and he starts breathing. For the very first time, he is traversed by something outside of himself. We can therefore say that his sphere has had a hole punched into it, thus turning it into a tore.

Two other phenomenas contributes to the creation of this hole: the experience of hunger (unpleasure), and the delay between the apparition and the disappearance of that sensation, that is the satisfaction brought about by the ingestion of food. Whereas inside the womb, this process was a feedback loop with no delay in its regulation controlled by biology. We can also say that that particular experience constitutes the first encounter with the real of the exuteros, the real of the pneuma. In his aetiology of anxiety, The Pathology of the Nightmare 1910, Ernest Jones had remarked that the physical symptoms of anxiety are directly related to breathing, such as the sensation of a weight on the chest. At a later stage of his existence, the baby experiences a second hole. He comes to realise that he is not everything for his mother, that she has other centres of interest. His imaginary supreme importance is punctured. Inside or on the surface of that hole, he will place something that his mother may want, that he possesses but others dont, and which will make him again the centre of her attention. Lacan called that something the phallus (not to be confused with the genital male organ), notated minus Phi. What that object actually is does not matter. What is important is that a place holder for it has been created, allowing the baby to engage in a dialectic of objects and love. If a particular object does not produce the expected effect, another one will be tried out. Hence, Lamour fait son objet de ce qui manque dans le rel (Love makes its object from what is missing in the real, crits, La psychanalyse et son enseignement, 1957, my translation). The notion of the phallus has a particular place in Lacans teaching. It is a signifier with no signified, and it

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only refers to itself. It acts as a clutch to allow for other signifiers to come into existence, since for Lacan, a signifier is characterised by its differential aspect. It corresponds in Freuds notion of Einzige Zuck (unique trait or feature). All other signifiers become a variation or metonymy of this initial trait or mark. It also corresponds to Gottlob Freges logical proof for the concept of zero.

Here, the relationship to Topology consists in how a hole is defined: a topological hole is a structure which prevents an object from being continuously shrunk to a point. Therefore this is not the hole in your pocket or socks. This distinction is important. The figure of the Borromean knot was used by Lacan to illustrate the characteristics of a subjective position. It is the result of a coinage (blocking, freezing) obtained when 3 loops are linked with another in such a way that if one of the loops is cut, the other 2 are free. Each loop represents a category: the real (all that exists, but has not yet been signified), the imaginary (produced knowledge), and the symbolic (the treasure chest of signifiers).

In the picture below, His Majesty the Baby sits atop the conjunction of all 3 loops. That conjunction is what hold us together as subjects. You can then guess what happens when the structure comes loose.

However, there is more to the Borromean knot. I do not know whether Lacan was aware of it or not. Knot theory is another branch of Mathematics. Of particular interest, is the Brunnian knot class, of which the Borromean knot is part, being the simplest knot. A brunnian knot is made of several non-knots, that is closed loops without any knot. Instead of loops, we can have strings forming knots: [video] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vshcgnSUtyI [/video] The knots of Celtic art are another example of Brunnian knots. Lacan was particularly interested in the

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Borromean knot as it required 3 loops, which fitted his 3 categories of real, symbolic and imaginary, as well as Freuds 3 categories of conscious, unconscious and pre-conscious, and later his 3 categories of ego, id and superego. A Brunnian knot can be made of any numbers of loops.

In a Borromean mesh, four Borromean rings are linked into a mesh, so that three sets of rings are mutually interlocked. No two sets of rings are linked, so if any one set is removed, the rest falls apart. If you use Wolframs Mathematica software, you will find on his site numerous applets to generate such rings.

Further, the circles need not be Euclidian circles, but for instance, Moebius strips. In this instance, what

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happens if you cut one of the loops is visually more obvious. To my mind, using Moebius strips is a more effective method.

Lacan worked his way from separate loops to the structure formed by their binding. It may be more visually intuitive to consider the binding structure first, then its unknotting. In the video below, the nonorientability of the brunnian formation is visually obvious, as it cannot be decided if it is the bars which keep the string together, or if it is the string which keeps the bars together. [video] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSdMvkY3NAc [/video] It is interesting to note that Molecular biology makes use of the concept of Brunnian knots to account for the way biological phenomena are linked together to produce an actual biological structure. From this, I have surmised the notion of Coherence Field, whereby in order to exist, a phenomenon must conform to the laws or exigencies specific to the field in which it manifests itself. For instance, Einsteins spacecontinuum coherence field is always curved. The path taken by any object must proceed along that curvature. Therefore, the shortest path between any 2 points is not a straight line, as per Euclidian geometry (and immediate intuition), but a curved line. Much can become clearer if we consider jouissance as a coherence field.