Lacan to the Limits: Instrumental Convergence and the Cut of Psychoanalysis

The idea of instrumental convergence, a combination of chance and necessity and the basis of the idea of exaptation (biological emergence) is critical in Lacanian psychoanalysis. But, to prove this point, it is necessary to push Lacan to the breaking point. Justification for this comes from Lacan himself, whose “mi-dire” style of lecturing made many think that he was the victim of Wernicke’s Aphasia, “when someone is able to speak well and use long sentences, but what they say may not make sense.” This video considers Lacan's mi-dire as a cut, a katagraphic cut, producing two chiaralistic edges that can substitute for the loss of the (scientific) principle of the modus tolens (that any proposition, to be scientific, must be refutable). A number of new terms are introduced to operationalize this "criticism by the cut," and a "Department Store Thesis" argues that the projective geometry principles of (1) an existential lack/surplus, (2) the spatial void, and (3) a corresponding temporal void are embodied in the modern institution of shopping. In Berlin's Ka/de/we, Helsinki's Stockmann, or Paris's La Samaritaine, we find these critical principles embodied in architectural forms that extend our idea of the "topologized" metaphor. Only by superimposing the fundamental polygon over Lacan's formula for metaphor do we see the way its four-part invention involves instrumental convergence, or how the rules of the game become the game itself.