Letters from Lacan : reading and the matheme

• Main Author: Aoki, Douglas Sadao
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/8687

This is a study of reading and how reading is complicated by an extraordinary letter delivered by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. That letter is the matheme, which is part ordinary language and part technical jargon, part literature and part science. For many readers, such a mongrel heritage means that the matheme becomes unreadable. I argue that the matheme can indeed be read, but only if the reader is willing to reconsider the nature, practice and limits of conventional reading. As a condensation of Lacanian theory, the matheme can only be read by wading into the densely intricated paradoxes of that theory. To cross the famous three registers of Lacan, the imaginary of the matheme—its image, line, and spatiality—reveals a real insufficiency and disruption of symbolic textuality. The matheme always frustrates and complicates reading, but from a Lacanian standpoint, this means that it illuminates the psychoanalytic politics of reading via its strategic opacity to the reader.