What is Knowledge?

Since we last met we attempted to stage a performance during one of the Insistance Colloquia, and because it is difficult to write on the www.sonecrit.com site itself (it has been added in its entirety to the Audio section of the site including any eventual errors since I am speaking, speaking to you, meaning when I do a seminar or lecture I talk without notes), I decided to write a text entitled “Draft of a Historical Picture of Christianity. An Hommage to Condorcet,” which is located in the Writings section of the site.

But I realized something once I really started writing – the importance of the universal.

Obviously this is an issue that is usually passed over in silence, despite the fact that Lacan tried to broach it from the perspective of the all (tout) and the not-all (pas-tout). In Greek cath-olós, which means “based on the all,” is the universal. Do you realize the word “Catholic” only entered the French language more or less in the XVIth century, since before that only Christianity was referred to.

Therefore it was as I was attempting to write something about what I had said at the Sorbonne, the locus of Catholic University, that this question arose concerning the universal, and the title “Draft of a Historical Picture of Christianity. An Hommage to Condorcet,” is intended to evoke Condorcet’s “Draft of a Historical Picture of Progress in the Human Mind,” which he wrote when he was alone and forced to hide from the bloodthirsty All of the revolutionary Terror.

I said quite a bit then about pictures and drafts. Today I should like to add that what is also at stake is that which weaves braids, a third which knots art psychoanalysis politics, insofar as what is most crucial is to never take them up two by two, because this has to be done on the basis of three.

Threeness is not thirdness. Three is what enables the one and the other, two, to make three. This was how Lacan defined the Real in the Borromean Knot: the two, Symbolic and Imaginary, can make three.

I assume this is what originally drove me to fictionalize, (of course), the encounter between Casanova and Mozart in September 1787.

We know this meeting had to have taken place but it cannot be confirmed because Casanova’s Story of My Life ends well before it. But there are notes here and there enabling it to be deduced, and since I have been so personally struck by the finale of Don Giovanni, I imagined Casanova had indeed come and gone from Prague several times, (this was certainly the case), that he and Mozart had spoken frequently, that he had attended the Don Giovanni premiere, and that Story of My Life, which he began to write two years later for unknown reasons, could have been a deferred effect (après-coup) of this meeting, in the same way as my writing of this encounter could have been, for the reader I discovered I had become, a deferred effect of the universal at the core of the Cath-olique, at the Sorbonne, Catholic University of old.

Thus this deferred effect changed everything because he was no longer writing Memoirs, and what is more they were not called memoirs anyway but Story of My Life.

This is even more important in light of the fact that the actual manuscript written by Giacomo Casanova himself from 1789 to 1798 was only recovered in 1960. In other words after 1798, he died on 5-June-1798 more precisely, the manuscript was transcribed, sold, translated into German, and eventually retranslated back into French by a French literature professor named Jean Lafforgues. But it was only later when the original appeared that a new hand was dealt conveying the existence of a unique set of stakes at issue in Casanova’s relationship to the French language, about which I have already spoken at great length.

And I have to tell you now that for me the first lines of this manuscript hit me like a thunderbolt – I had read them before but had not noticed what a picture they paint:

“I am not only a Monotheist but a Christian, fortified by Philosophy which never hurt anything.”

Right from the very beginning Casanova raised the question of the articulation of something that makes three, Monotheism, Christianity Philosophy. Given he had indicated previously the Stoic Philosophy he believed had guided him throughout his life to that point, in particular by following the maxim spoken to him by the Venetian Senator Malpiero – sequere deum, Follow God, this already leaves room for us to presuppose that a deferred effect had taken place.

In this light we also might wonder whether the two constituted by Monotheism and Christianity can really be articulated with it to make three, or whether they are inevitably unbound.

In fact this is a question of logic, the logic of the quanteurs Lacan spoke about. What I mean is we cannot seek refuge in explanations, not matter what they are, because in fact this is about an experience of discourse. This was more or less how things appeared to me anyway, and then I ran into the man often described as Christianity’s doctrinarian, Paul of Tarsus.

Indeed one of Saint Paul’s Epistles was written in a moment of anger, the Letter to the Galatians. He wrote it in the year 57 A.D., one year before the Letter to the Romans. Most people make reference to the latter, which he took the time to edit and in which he expresses his position coolly, to wit that circumcision is not necessary because faith in the risen Jesus Christ is sufficient to be saved.

In the Letter to the Galatians there is a point where, after having explained what happened, after having recounted that James, who sat in authority over the community in Jerusalem, had sent circumcised Jews to Galatia to supervise his teaching, since he was not part of the original 12 Apostles and thus could not be legitimate, he said something I had already read before but never really noticed as such:

“There can be neither Jew nor Greek, there can be neither bond nor free, there can be no male and female; for ye all are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, KJV).

So what this is understood to mean in everyday discourse, what we might call propositional discourse, is that Jesus Christ redeemed original sin by his death and resurrection and that henceforth there are no more differences, all may be redeemed if they believe in Christ their Savior.

We are all one (Tous nous sommes un), is what the Church would extract from this in the centuries that followed, following the institution of the Dogmas that closed the Councils of the Fourth Century, (Henri Fontana will say something about this because he has worked on this question).

And “We are all one” also refers to conversion, to the way in which the Church defined itself as proclaimed in the credo: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church, Credo…in unam, sanctam, catolicam et apostolicam eclesiam.”

The Catholic Church used Saint Paul to make itself appear to be Catholic, to seem as if it encompassed the dimension of the One which is thereby sanctified and also the apostolic mission, meaning the mission of conversion. This raises a question as to whether this is in fact what Paul was seeking to convey, whether he thought this or not, because these three impossibilities are not really impossible in fact, because it’s obvious there will always be Jews, Greeks, men and women, and thus we are not dealing with an impossibility in the sense of something that is unthinkable, something else must be at stake.

That “there are no more” than these impossibilities, whose number is three, and which are, what is more, formulated in negative form and yet resolved by an affirmation, question us from the perspective of logic, and it is from this dimension that we shall approach them, I think it is in this respect that there is something surprising and that we have to allow ourselves to work through and be worked through by this logic.

This letter is a kind of cry from the heart. Paul was angry, he let loose with something. This something really leaves a stain as opposed to the rest, since before it, before he says it, he introduces himself, says what he has done, in the name of whom he speaks, etc., and then suddenly this stain appears that threatens to become a gaze arresting all thought.

Casanova arrests us with a similar stain when he wrote: “I am not only monotheist but Christian, fortified by Philosophy which never hurt anything.”

What I mean is there is something on the order of an affirmation there, from the beginning, which is important and is typically passed over, in my imagination a “reve-olution” (Dream-olution) that is surpassing the Revolution, something, (this is what I am trying to convey to you a bit), touching on the dialectic connecting the all and the One.

This Beyond, of meaning of course, raises a question Lacan asked in his Seminars Encore and then Les non-dupes. In particular if you take a fresh look at the meetings that took place in December 1973-February 1974, you will see him return to this point in order to further explicate what he had previously defined as being the “not-all” in woman and there is a sentence here that is really quite extraordinary, I heard it because I have the CDs, at a certain point in the meeting on 15-January-1974, he says, this is the first time I’ve heard it this way, I must tell you, he explains all sorts of things, he explains that the all, the question of the all is what Man builds when he speaks, meaning…but careful, Man in extension is really the masculine part of speaking being. Typically when the masculine part of the speaking being speaks it produces a discourse that is written with a circle of string, meaning something that runs around in circles.

And he advances what Aristotle dared not to, but could have, which is that “every man is not woman” (tout homme n’est pas femme). This is not the same thing as saying “man is not woman,” because to say “every man is not woman” is to presuppose something on the order of an exception.

In the dimension of the universal, of the All and the One, there is a distinction to be made between the universal of masculine knowledge (savoir masculine) and the universal in the feminine. I’m reminded of something Lacan said in Television: “All women are not crazy, as is said. This is why they are not all, meaning not crazy-at/for-(the)-all, but accommodating (to it) instead.” ("Toutes les femmes sont folles, qu'on dit. C’est pourquoi elles sont pas toutes, c’est-à-dire, pas folles- du- tout, arrangeantes plutôt… )

This was Lacan’s answer based on the experience of discourse, and I am trying to take the next step with you in regards to this, because here we are totally immersed in an experience of discourse in which, as soon as the speaking being speaks, he is on the side of “Every man,” in the sense of that which runs in circles.

And yet what Lacan enables us to imagine is that suddenly “a woman may be produced when there is a knotting, or better yet a braiding.”

There you have it, “All” is braided with “One.”

“That” (ça) is what the experience of the transference is. “That” is the knot, the braid (tressé), that is the wellspring of the object (a). “Upright” (dressé), “that is not.” (ce n’est pas ça).

My reading of Casanova has pushed me in this direction, but I cannot say how.

Suddenly what comes back is the argument made at the beginning of the year, when Freud upbraided Lucy R. by saying, “but if you knew ‘that’ why did you not say so?.” We approached it again in one of Lacan’s interpretations of the Rat Man’s dreams, when he pointed out that of course the dream signified that he was not marrying her for her pretty eyes but for her money, but that the black spot she had in place of each eye, the turds, was “the gaze, it was death which was gazing at him with asphalt eyes,” and that this is the Symbolic continuity the analyst must give in the transference.

What also comes back is the title of this seminar, knowledge (le savoir). This Knowledge is not a knowledge of something, it has neither complement nor subject because it is the substantive (noun) of an infinitive, it is absolute knowledge.

When we say the word “knowledge” we do not normally envision we are touching on something infinitive because it lacks subject and object and is related to absolute knowledge, that it is absolutum, ab, movement towards the outside, solutum from solvere, to dissolve, meaning that what is at stake is to dissolve something, to distance oneself from the subject who knows something. Absolute knowledge functions all alone, beyond all thought as a thinking of the all.

Thus a question arises: Despite whatever else might be said about this statement of Paul’s, is there not something in its structure that pertains to this order of absolute knowledge?

The Church, as I mentioned a moment ago, would interpret it in a highly specific way, in the mode, I would say, of the all, a mode that it finds useful because it was the one that first established it. It congealed, it closed itself off, it became political, it became organized, it took power by the end of the Fourth Century to such an extent that those who were not Christian were banished.

Nothing has changed, the center around which it turns remains the same but it is it which occupies and delimits it. It will all keep on turning around and around, universally. This is what is true, the truth of, the fantasm.

Keywords:

Eglise Sainte, Catholique, Universel, articulation du Tout et du Un, Tout homme, l’Un, Une femme, Triplicité, Tresse, Discours, Savoir absolu, Infinitif.

Iglesia Santa, Católico, Universal, articulación del Todo y de lo Uno, Todo Hombre, lo Uno, Una mujer, Triplicidad, Trenza, Discurso, Saber absoluto, Infinitivo.

Holy Church, Catholic, Universal, Articulation of the All with the One, the One, A woman, Triplicity, Braid, Discourse, Absolute Knowledge, Infinitive.