Suture is a Lacanian concept, but not a concept of Lacan’s. According to Alain Badiou, Jacques-Alain Miller’s paper, ‘Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signifier)’ was “the first great Lacanian text not to be written by Lacan himself” (Badiou, ‘A Contemporary Use of Frege’, in Number and Numbers, p.25). In simple terms, the achievement of Miller’s text that has gained it the reputation Badiou acknowledges was to find a place for the subject in structure – to demonstrate how the structure could essentially become subjectivised through a suture between the subject of the signifier and the signifying structure. Moreover, the sort of subject Miller demonstrates in his paper is one that doesn’t require any consciousness, any psychology, any ‘imaginary’ to use Lacan’s term.

Miller’s paper was first delivered as an intervention at Lacan’s seminar ‘Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis’ on 24th February 1965 (full seminar available here) and then written up to feature in the first edition of the Cahiers pour l’Analyse the following year. Two recent events give us occasion to return to Miller’s paper and look at it more closely.

Firstly, the publication at the end of last year of two volumes on the Cahiers pour l’Analyse, Concept and Form, under the editorship of Peter Hallward and Knox Peden. Secondly, Miller’s own announcement that after being wound up in 1969 publication of the Cahiers will be resumed, with the first of the new editions scheduled for release in early 2014.

In this article we will look in depth at Miller’s paper, with the aid of commentary provided by Hallward, Zizek and others. ‘Suture’ first found its way into English translation for the journal Screen in 1978 by Jacqueline Rose (a copy of which is available here), but for the purposes of this article I will be referencing the version which appears in Hallward’s volume, and all page references will be to that.

Before looking at the body of the text, a note on Miller’s rather bold opening remarks which have a certain resonance for psychoanalysis today. At this point in his life Miller was neither analyst nor analysand; indeed, the initial presentation at Lacan’s Seminar took place barely a few days after his 21st birthday. His introduction to the presentation thus quite bravely takes the form of questioning why the audience should be listening to him at all. Yet the answer he offers is quite eloquent and creative, appealing to the topological model of the Mobius strip, which by this time Lacan had already employed in previous seminars, to challenge the pure binary of inside/outside in respect of the psychoanalytic community:

“… The Freudian field is not representable as a closed surface. The opening up of psychoanalysis is not the effect of the liberalism, the whim, the blindness even of he who has set himself as its guardian. For, if not being situated on the inside does not relegate you to the outside, it is because at a certain point, excluded from a two-dimensional topology, the two surfaces join up and the periphery or outer edge crosses over the circumscription.” (p.91-92).

Pushed to its logical horizon, the implication here is that there is no such thing as a psychoanalytic community. Of course, read in one way this is not just conceptually but empirically true – the history of psychoanalysis, to this very day, has been the history of dispute, split, dissolution and division amongst psychoanalysts themselves, and by extension their various schools and orientations. But in a sense more specific to the context in which Miller delivered his paper, it is worth noting that Lacan’s audience in the mid-1960s was not limited to current or trainee analysts, but a wide spread of academics, intellectuals and the curious grounded in a range of disparate disciplines. Fortunately, this is still true today. Lacan himself never confined his thinking to standard psychoanalytical reference points, declaring with a hint of uncharacteristic modesty at one point, “I take things where I find them, and I hope nobody minds” (Seminar X, 14.11.1962.)

We can also note in passing that Miller’s methodology is very close to the one Lacan became famous for employing. Taking a word out of ordinary everyday usage, he plucks it from its common context, and applies it to the domain of psychoanalysis. As Lacan did with foreclosure, so Miller does with suture.

 

“Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in [tenant-lieu]. For while there lacking it is not purely and simply absent. Suture, by extension – the general relation of lack to the structure – of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of [tenant-lieu].” (p.93).

 

A crucial reference for Miller in this text is the nineteenth century German mathematician Gottlob Frege. What interests Miller about Frege is the way he addresses the following question, which Miller specifies at the beginning of his paper:

“Here then is the question posed in its most general form:

what is it that functions in the series of whole natural numbers to which we can assign their progression?

And the answer, which I shall give at once before establishing it:

in the process of the constitution of the series, in the genesis of progression, the function of the subject, miscognised, is operative” (p.94)

So, jumping ahead to his conclusion, Miller is saying that the subject is the element that makes possible the progression (whether of signifiers or numbers), the moving, from one number or signifier to another. Miller notes that Frege would disagree, however, as his theory is designed precisely to exclude the subject (p.94).

But if Frege does not have a concept of the subject, Miller elucidates a concept of identity that he does have. Let’s follow Miller in his outline of Frege (or at least what he takes from his work), looking first at this definition of identity which Frege in turn borrows from Leibniz:

“Those things are identical of which one can be substituted for the other salva veritate, without loss of truth.” (p.96).

For everything not identical to itself Frege employs the concept zero. Zero therefore fails the test of truth – “in the autonomous construction of the logical through itself, it has been necessary, in order to exclude any reference to the real, to evoke on the level of the concept an object not-identical-with-itself, to be subsequently rejected from the dimension of truth” (p.97).

With this established as a starting point, we can move on. Frege’s theory has three elements:

  • Concept – the thing identical with the concept of X [where X here stands for a thing]
  • Object – the concept as a unit
  • Number – 1, assigned to the concept of X, but not 1 as a number (for example, in the sequence 1,2,3, etc) but 1 as a count of the concept of a thing, X.

Frege also specifies two relations between these three elements:

  • Subsumption – of the concept to the object
  • Assignation – of the concept to the number

Miller summarises: “A number is assigned to a concept which subsumes objects” (p.94).

To pick up Miller’s text at p.96 in Hallward and Peden’s volume:

“Let us now put into operation Frege’s schema, that is, go through the three-stage itinerary which he prescribes to us. Let there be a thing X of the world. Let there be the empirical concept of this X. The concept which finds a place in the schema is not this empirical concept but that which redoubles it, being ‘identical with the concept of X’. The object which falls under this concept X is itself, as a unit. In this the number, which is the third term of the sequence, to be assigned to the concept of X will be the number 1. Which means that this function of the number 1 is repetitive for all things of the world. It is in this sense that this 1 is only the unit which constitutes [the] number [le nombre] as such, and not the 1 in its personal identity as a number with its own particular place and a proper name in the series of numbers. Furthermore, its construction demands that, in order to transform it, we call upon a thing of the world – which, according to Frege, cannot be [done]: the logical must be sustained through nothing but itself.” (p.96)

Then Miller explains the importance of being able to introduce zero to this system:

“In order for the number to pass from the repetition of the 1 of the identical to that of its ordered succession, in order for the logical dimension to gain its autonomy definitively, without any reference to the real the zero has to appear.” (p.96-97)

As we have seen, Frege uses the concept of zero to encompass anything not identical with itself. As Hallward puts it in his introduction to Concept and Form:

“For Frege, following Leibniz, any concept can only subsume an object insofar as that object can indeed be treated as an object, i.e., as a self-identical unit or ‘one’. Anything that counts as a thing counts insofar as it can be counted as one thing, and science (or true discourse) excludes anything that does not count in this way. The number zero, then, can be assigned to the number of things that do not thus count, i.e., that are not self-identical: there are none such things.” (Hallward, p.48-49).

In other words, the concept of zero is independent from its object, because there is no object that cannot be counted as ‘one thing’. It is a concept without an object, in Frege’s sense. Hallward continues his exposition:

“But there is also only one number that quantifies this absence, i.e., there is only one zero. We can thus derive the number one as the ‘proper name’ of the number zero, and by repeating this derivation (i.e., by repeating the exclusion of the non-identical) we can generate the unending numerical succession of 1+1+1…” (ibid, p.49).

To put this idea in simple terms: you can only count something that can be counted as one; but at the same time you have to have a concept of nothing, and so you need a way of counting nothing as something, and this is what zero as a number does – it provides an assignation of the concept of nothing. As a number, a countable number, rather than a concept, zero sutures the lack – stitches up the gap between the concept of nothing and the fact of there being something that represents or counts that nothing. Miller refers to this process, the operation of this logic, as a summoning and rejection. It is summoned as something – namely, zero, (with as Hallward says, 1 being the ‘proper name’ of zero) but it is then rejected as nothing on the grounds that it fails the test of truth that Frege employs following Leibniz. Zero is thus, in effect, an excess; as Miller puts it, “the excess which operates in the series of numbers” (p.99). And, he follows, the subject is equivalent to this excess.

The appearance of the subject in the signifying structure also shares the characteristic of summoning and rejection that Miller sees operative for zero as outlined above. He describes a way in which we can think of this process at the end of his paper:

“By crossing logical discourse at its point of least resistance, that of its suture, you can see articulated the structure of the subject as a ‘flickering in eclipses’, like the movement which opens and closes [the] number, and delivers up the lack in the form of the 1 in order to abolish it in the successor” (p.101).

 

“Our purpose has been to recognise in the zero number the suturing stand-in for the lack” (p.99).

 

The signifier represents the subject in the same way that zero as a number represents lack, or ‘nothing itself’, as a concept. If the subject is just a product of the signifying chain, if the subject only exists as a lack in the gaps between signifiers, then, as Hallward explains, “given this gap, a signifier can represent it as a (or one) gap for another signifier, and can do so indefinitely.” (Hallward, p.49). In other words, the gap, lack or absence itself can count as absence, as one, and thus be represented signifier to signifier.

An important implication thus arises. Does this mean that in order for the movement of signifiers to get going there has to be a subject to be represented as lack for other signifiers? This is the conclusion that Miller states at the beginning of his paper that he will reach when he writes that “the unity which could be called unifying of the concept insofar as it is assigned by the number is subordinate to the unit as distinctive insofar as it supports the number.” (p.95) In his commentary on Miller’s paper, ‘‘Suture’, Forty Years Later’, Zizek elaborates on the necessity of this representation of lack for the cohesion of the structure:

“If the identity of a signifier is nothing but the series of its constitutive differences [e.g., night from day – a signifier can only be defined in opposition to what it is not], then every signifying series has to be supplemented – ‘sutured’ – by a reflexive signifier which itself has no determinate meaning (no signified), since it stands only for the presence of meaning as such, the presence of meaning as opposed to its absence…. Every signifying field thus has to be ‘sutured’ by a supplementary zero-signifier…. This signifier is ‘a symbol in its pure state’: lacking any determinate meaning, it stands for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence” (Zizek in Hallward, p.150-151).

And this appropriately-named zero-signifier is coextensive with the place of the subject as Miller locates it in his paper. This can be seen as Miller’s great triumph – demonstrating that for the structure to have any coherence it needs a subject. However, the question would then be – does this subject have to be identical to a lack, fulfilling the same function as zero does for Frege? In other words, is Miller  just drawing on Frege’s use of the concept of zero to provide a handy way to think about Lacan’s famous dictum ‘the signifier represents a subject for another signifier’?

The suture at work for Miller is between zero as a concept (nothing, lack, basically something which is impossible to conceptualise) and zero as a number. But in the same way, Miller’s argument is that the subject cannot be represented in the signifying chain – because it, like the concept of zero, is non-conceptualisable – so it’s sutured into a number, basically, a ‘one’. Hallward explains this point:

“… From one link to another of a signifying chain, a signifier represents, places or ‘sutures’ (i.e., treats-as-identical or counts-as-one), for another signifier, that essential lack of self-identity or place which is all that can be represented of the subject qua subject” (Hallward, p.50).

This is what Miller is getting at in the quote at the beginning of this article:

“Suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse; we shall see that it figures there as the element which is lacking, in the form of a stand-in [tenant-lieu]. For while there lacking it is not purely and simply absent. Suture, by extension – the general relation of lack to the structure – of which it is an element, inasmuch as it implies the position of a taking-the-place-of [tenant-lieu].” (p.93).

 

“Now, if the series of numbers, metonymy of the zero, begins with its metaphor, if the 0 member of the series as number is only the standing-in-place suturing the absence (of the absolute zero) which moves beneath the chain according to the alternation of a representation and an exclusion – then what is there to stop us from seeing in the restored relation of the zero to the series of numbers the most elementary articulation of the subject’s relation to the signifying chain?” (p.99)

 

This passage shows how clearly Miller draws a parallel between the function of zero for Frege and the place of the subject for Lacan. (We can note in passing that, in this, Miller can be seen as responding to the famous question he posed to Lacan which helped first bring him to the latter’s attention – namely, at the start of Seminar XI, whether Lacan’s conception of the subject supposes an ontology.) As if to reinforce the equivalence he draws, in the passage above Miller also highlights the correspondence to Lacan’s use of the operations of metaphor and metonymy. We can schematise this as follows:

Equivalence between the function of zero and the place of the subject in Suture.

An online synopsis of ‘Suture’ put together by Hallward and Peden elaborates on this point:

“Miller argues that the ‘verticality’ of this movement from zero to one, by which ‘the 0 lack comes to be represented as 1 […], indicates a crossing, a transgression’; the successor operation installs a ‘horizontal’ sequence of numbers on the basis of this primary ‘verticality’ (46-47/31). Whereas ‘logical representation’ tends to collapse this construction, the Lacanian concepts of metaphor and metonymy are capable of articulating this construction within a logic of the signifier.2 The primary ‘metaphor’ of the substitution of 1 for 0 is the motor for ‘the metonymic chain of successional progression’.” (Text available here)

In the same way that zero works to suture between absence (the concept of zero) and number (zero as countable number, 1 being the ‘proper name’ of zero), what Lacan calls the unary trait – and what Freud had designated as ‘ein einziger Zug’ – sutures between what is outside the field of the Other (the subject) and what is inside the field of the Other (the signifying chain):

“What constitutes this relation as the matrix of the chain must be isolated in the implication which makes the determinant of the exclusion of the subject outside the field of the Other its representation in that field in the form of the one of the unique, the one of distinctive unity, which is called ‘unary’ by Lacan.” (p.100, for the reference to Lacan see Seminar XI, p.141).

In other words, the subject is the lack, the signifier is the trait, and by extension “the relation of lack to the trait should be considered as the logic of the signifier” (p.99).

Just as zero sutures between nothing (lack) and something (the numeral denoting this lack, 1) to guarantee the progression of numbers (1,2,3…), we can say that the unary trait sutures between the signifying structure and the subject as lack. As Zizek (in the quote above) highlights, it is necessary to have a signifier to signify the lack in the signifying structure. This is why Miller states that “… the definition of the subject comes down to the possibility of one signifier more” (p.100).

Essentially, what Miller is doing is to show that we cannot find a place for the subject if we just have the concepts of signifier and signified – with only these concepts we inevitably fall into structuralism.

An important implication of the way Miller presents the subject here is that you can have a subjectivity without a psychology – there is no need for any reference to consciousness, for example. As he explains:

“… The representation of the subject (as signifier) which excludes consciousness because it is not effected for someone, but in the chain, in the field of truth, for the signifier which precedes it. When Lacan faces the definition of… the signifier as that which represents the subject for another signifier, he is stressing that insofar as the signifying chain is concerned, it is on the level of its effects and not of its cause that consciousness is to be situated. The insertion of the subject into the chain is representation” (p.101).

It is thanks to this ‘consciousness as effect’ that Miller avoids psychologising the subject.

By Owen Hewitson, LacanOnline.com

Creative Commons Licence
All content on LacanOnline.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.