The Indistinct Names

Homonymy and Synonymy

By Jean-Claude Milner
The purpose of this translation is to contribute to the
study of ideas. It is not intended for publication or
commercial use of any kind.
Equivocation and declination: these are the necessities of the material out of which
names are woven - that is, language [langue], without which nothing could be said.
However puried and distinctive we might want it to be, there is always the moment
when a given notch [coche] operated on one of the rings will have the same name as
another notch, operated on another ring. In even more strict terms, every time that a
name has been posited, it should be clear that, because of its truth effect, it can only be
constituted as a borromean point: a point where the three rings hold together and touch
on each other, unless they fall apart. From this, it follows that such a name cannot nd
part of a ring without nding part of the other two; it cannot situate itself distinctively on
one ring without being situated on the other two as well. This is a radical homonymy: at
every instant of naming, the homonymy effectuates itself, thus maintaining the
necessity that the borromean encounter should indissolubly be the cause of
equivocation.
Therefore, it is not the homophony as such which is determinant. Certainly, the
conjecture is easy and, taken to the letter, it authorizes all the endeavors which, tearing
llanguage from sound [phonie], refer it to univocity. Hence these soundless [hors-
phonies] languages, commonly baptized as writings, in which we are supposed to think
that only the symbolic distinctiveness, or the real lineament, is at play. The formalized
writings spell this dream, but so do the tables of categories, in which it seems like we
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have reached pure determinations, prior to which there would be no articulatable
name. But this is still a dream: the homophony might have withered away, together with
the sound, but not the homonymy. Thus, the chain of categories, however minimal we
might want them to be, reveals itself to be incessantly eroded: as we have seen,
whoever wants to keep himself solely to the - supposedly pure - names of Being, the
Same, the Other, the One, does not cease to attest that every point constructed in this
way co-belongs to the three rings, so that the three hold themselves together and
simultaneously separate themselves through this very co-belonging.
Only an outside-of-language would be able to dissipate the homonymy. Be it imagined
as a pure thought, detached from llanguage, or as an exorbitant language, it is always
the wish of such a point that we emit, whose subsistence is the same as that of
metalanguage. Besides, it matters little if one wants to reestablish a synonymical
harmony or an antinomic contradiction through it; in both cases, we suppose that the
homonymy could be mastered and that at least (some)one could know onto which ring
one holds oneself: a God, most certainly, if it existed, would have the power to tell
when homonymous names are synonymous or when they are not, the power, in any
case, to keep the two apart. And, if such a God is not supposed, we can nevertheless
provide substitutes for it and to delineate this place where no homonymous drift
[drive] occurs. But the real is that nothing of the kind exists and that the drift is
incessant: therefore, neither the optimist version of the synonymy, nor the pessimist
version of the irreconcilability of homonymies, but the constant, and not assured,
possibility of their indistinction or disjunction.
The homonymy of names is constant, be they uttered in I, in R or in S. It is nothing but
the testimony of their absolute non-relation: well, from the fact that such existences are
without relations it follows precisely that they could coincide: in effect, it is only from a
relation that the obligation or interdiction of the encounter could be born. Thus, the
different Ones, because they are absolutely heterogeneous, are not in complementary
distribution. It happens - contingit - that they touch. Then, we can say that the three
rings, borromeanly knotted, are joined in a point and that this point has the same name
in the three rings. In this singular and precarious instant, the homonymy is truly
converted into synonymy: whatever ring it should be inscribed in, the One situates, by
contiguity, the point of the same name that belongs to the other rings.
The Ones are, for an instant, synonymous: at the same time, the other categories
follow. The Same, the Other, Being, are concentrated in points of synonymical and
contingent contiguity, where the diverse rings seem to repeat themselves mutually.
At least, this is the hypothesis: It might happen - and it might not happen - that the
Ones are synonymous [Il peut arriver - et ne pas arriver - que les Uns soient
synonymes].
Thus it is constructed the form of the contingent encounter that a representable
[rpresentable] implies, given that it accepts the One of I, but also a name, given that it
knots I to the One of S, and which touches on the real, given that it clashes against the
One of R. This is why we shall call it real naming [nomination relle], with a name
which appears, consequently, as the summary of every contingent synonymy of Ones.
Let us also call it the case, by which are covered the perception of realist properties -
eventually clinical -, of a proper name and the real of a subjective position. Let us also
call it sense, given that the truth effect of an utterance is detached from its
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representable signications and exceeds its signifying material. Let us call it, nally,
truth, provided that we mean the effect which follows from a statement at the instant it
touches justly [touche juste (with exactitude)].
Analysis, in its simple possibility, has no other foundation. This is what we have
managed to isolate in the form of the minimal hypothesis of which the one above is but
a drier variant: the individual who is affected by the unconscious is the same who
constitutes the subject of a signier (Encore, p.142 of english edition). We recognize
here the essential of a synonymical clash between the One of I, as individual, the One
of R, as subject, and the One of S, as signier: what else [is this] if not a particular
value of the fundamental matrix of the contingent encounter? We understand, thusly,
that a discourse which results from such a hypothesis has as its crowning the case, as
its effect, the truth, and as its exercise, the interpretation, which is nothing but the
speech which produces sense [fait sens] and encounter. This is what is registered by a
writing in which a signier can occupy the place of truth; this is what is implicated by
the hidden axiom that truth speaks, that silence, therefore, is not its ultimate place.
But, once more, the homonymy erodes the names. We can surely prevent this,
distinguishing between case and conjecture, sense and signication, interpretation and
explanation. We can seek to separate truths: for the truth which is a real encounter and
only attests itself in the instant of an effect has the same name of the symbolic truth,
xed in tables and coerced by rigor in the handling of letters, and the imaginary truth,
founded upon the stable adequacy of two beings - thing and name, object and idea, etc
- endowed with properties (where, as we know, the paradox of the third man, matrix of
all metalanguages, is founded). Well, no conguration of S, no imaginary disposition
can perpetuate nor guarantee an effect which springs from the instant and the
contingent.
For the encounter is here indissolubly a point of distancing: in the moment a name
says the real cut, the rings are undone through this very utterance, like marble spheres
which, as they touch, repel each other innitely. The synonymy, if it exists, can only,
therefore, be precarious and uncertain. If it inscribes itself in the representables and
the utterable, it can only be at the cost of not conforming either to the thesis of
constancy, or to the antithesis of impossibility. There is always synonymy, some say,
silly optimists, generally dumb, who believe in everything that is said. There is never
synonymy, say others, skeptics, non-duped, and, generally, scoundrels. The hypothesis
here is quite another: Sometimes it happens and sometimes it does not happen that
we might knot the place where the rings intercut.
A hypothesis, it has been said, and most reasonably, for nothing deductible can convert
it into a theorem. At best, we can support it by the fact that the system of imaginary
synonymies - namely, discourses - always knows what disperse them: a name which,
when uttered, makes truth bloom as an unknotting.
The real history of speaking beings is made only of these synonymical fractures,
momentary and suspended. This is why one can guess that analysis turns them into its
material, and that, sometimes, they can be recognized in those practices which, from
history as Geschichte, make history as Historie: archeology and philological sciences.
Except that, to speak of history is already to have constructed series which are ready
to be adapted to the realist connections - be them causal or not. Historians, by not
restricting themselves to the session [sance (as in analytical session)], cannot
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escape the squabble: if their object is nothing but the emergence of sense and the
case, its material can only be representable: signications and conjectures. At the
same time the symptom of the discourse of history is constructed, at the junction
between the dispersive emergence and the linked seriation: the event, the moment, the
cut, the new idea, in short: the gure of the new, of which the modern is the stable
correlative.
The encounter, in fact, is always new in relation to the discourse which - as long as this
encounter operates - seems always to pre-exist it and to be dispersed by it. Once the
condition which submits the representables to temporal succession is ruled out, there
remains the pure and simple moved [boug] in the structures: a necessarily novel
way of knotting the three rings, - given that, were it to have already been recognized, it
would already have ceased making a real synonymy.
However, a supplementary turn was accomplished in the meanwhile, a turn in which
the very demand that there is history and the certainty that the synonymy could take
place is founded. In fact, everything happens as if, in the world which is next to us, the
homonymy had pushed its edge into every term up to the most extreme, by proposing,
as the structure of imaginary representabilities, a word which would say nothing but its
own synonymy. So that the supposition of a real synonymy is said according to the
same ways as its imaginary counterpart.
In fact, there has been a day in which the three Ones were explicitly supposed
synonymous: might it have been Ionia, Athens Rome, perhaps Erasmus or Montaigne
or England? It matters little: let us keep only the memory that somewhere, sometime,
one could say: habeas corpus, where it should not be read only the ultimate word of
possessive individualism, but also the heroic postulation that the imaginary One of the
specularizable body should be decipherable as the sign of a real One, that is, of a
subject. Evidently, [this is accomplished] through the mediation that is proper of the
social link - that is, of the emergence of a symbolic One in the form of the proper noun,
inscribed in a list, preferably an electoral one, in an identity card, or simply uttered by
an instance worried with not taking someone for some other. That is why it is required
that one should respect the integrity of the body and the property of the name: torture
and anonymity become two faces of the same crime.
What is singular here is that, supposedly, only the symbolic One would be necessary
and sufcient to found a link. Since the goal of every society is to assemble [fair tenir
ensemble], that is, to make speaking beings simultaneous and compatible, one might
believe that only a positive homogenization could accomplish this: to give material and
representable signs of what unites, this is the recognized efcacy of so many shared
myths or customs. Except that it - namely, this point of linkage [point de lien] - risks
substituting the cosmologies or the ancient religions with the more manageable forms
proposed by the historical recollections, the common geographies or the races. Here,
nothing of such: what refers to the imaginary is reduced to its bareness [nudit], given
that nothing of representable has value unless it is added to the pure and simple
material support of unity, in other words, a speaking body. From this place, and solely
from there, should the only links admissible by right [en droit] be born: what could only
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be accomplished if everything was authorized by the symbolic One, of which the
imaginary individual becomes, in his very disincarnation, the adequate lieutenant
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.
Thus, it is only through the power of synonymy that a discourse should pass from the
symbolic One, which separates, to the imaginary One, which homogenizes, and bring
about an imaginarizable Same - let us call it equality - of a Same disconnected of every
property - let us call it universality. The fact that no other force is required, neither God
nor Master, this is what qualies an order as liberal: the formal liberties are in it the
knotting of the symbolic One - oppositional and negative - to the imaginary One,
adorned with all the positive and representable unicities. Let us understand, thus, that,
[even as] negative and properly formal, they [i.e. liberties] nevertheless situate the
place of the individual in Reality: a body which expresses, thinks, displaces, lives and
dies by itself.
And, furthermore, we [thereby] conjecture that one has thus founded the One of a
subject. We guess here the role played by the emergence of a science which is dened
by discarding the set of sensible qualities and which, therefore, intends to claim only
the Number and the letter, that is, the pure distinctiveness of the symbol: therefore, the
subject nds himself, as it is said, sutured. In this condition, the subject does not really
resist against being named [ne rsiste gure a tre nomm] by the same name as the
individual and the citizen. The Enlightenment says this encounter, which comes from
science, between the demands of blossoming and the political liberties.
They [the liberties] simultaneously say happiness, which reveals itself, in its form and
substance, to be the new idea par excellence, given that it consists entirely in
supposing that a real naming is always inscribable in the series of representations and
that it is, structurally, always renewing.
Thus, that is where the very lie will install itself, given that an order intends to make a
constant institution of that which, structurally, can only be a contingent encounter.
Therefore, happiness becomes trickery; what should articulate itself as a synonymy of
Ones proposes under this name the triumph of the only imaginary One: the individual
reduced to its survival. Everything which comes from the symbolic One will,
consequently, serve but to adorne this individual, and to convert [itself] into
representable properties: the dryness of the distinctive becomes bourgeois sobriety;
the power of the Number is converted into measure and numerary; the instance of the
pure Name becomes the signature of the subjected [dassujetti]. The real One of the
subject is also not safe from adulteration, thanks to the aseptic substitutes which are
the I [Moi] and its currencies: characteristics and particularities. However insistent they
may be, these remarks are easily addressed to a set which is conceived to this very
end: passions, arts, literatures - they offer themselves easily [as addressees], thanks to
the structure of style, the well-healed scar of a desire. Medicine, as the technique of
the case, soon becomes the nal discourse. Then, the modern gure of education is
constructed: no longer the paideia, but the means of mass communication, in which
everything must concur to confront and prepare a good individual, in the bosom of a
good community.
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1
Translation note: lieu means place in French - lieutentant means both a position in the
military and, if taken quite literally, the placeholder.
Let us avoid, then, the belief in the permanent and necessary synonymy. But let us also
consent to its radical impossibility. With it, our thought, as such, would be regulated and
would negate it absolutely, equally requiring our own annihilation and the cessation of
every thought. The hypothesis was that homonymies sometimes are synonymies: now
it reveals itself that an imaginary conguration ordered itself there, a conguration
which we will avoid naming West or Europe and which, nevertheless, is nothing but
that: a world in which speeches and conducts can eventually follow a truth effect; a
world in which truth can say I speak and not be accomplished either with silence, or
with ataxia.
That is where the Theatre, History, Love and Philosophy were born - which, mattering
to us, do not matter everywhere. There were also born the formal liberties and
psychoanalysis, which claims them: not by mere convenience, but because they are
the representation of the contingent encounter - because the desiring subject never
sustains itself better in Reality than as the free citizen in its movements and its
purposes. It matters little, then, that it should be demonstrated what there is of recent
and of regional in these realist correlates: whoever were to consider any realist
synonymy as a dream, bland or pretty, issued from the tireless demand of happiness,
should also admit that every encounter, thusly gured in the imaginary, has the same
name as every real encounter, and that this is the point.
Provided, at least, that no univocal Politics should result from the Real. But is this not
precisely what the homonymy implicates, that is, llanguage?
Translated from:
Milner, J.-C. (2007) Les Noms Indistincts. Paris: Verdier
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