The Tattoo of the Other

Abstract

A Cartel is a small working group formed to study Lacan’s work in a non-hierarchical, open ended and rigorous way. This essay presents the results of a Cartel in which the logic of the Cartel itself was the subject-matter: from the Freudian hypothesis of unconsciousness, through Decartes’ impossible choice of the cogito (either I am, or I think) to Lacan’s topological solution. The key point of the question is the relationship with the Other, i.e. Pascal’s “God of philosophers”, which channels the discussion toward a one-two-and-three dialectic that Lacan, with the help of Dante, overcomes by adopting the concept of Bedeutung, not in the sense of “meaning” but rather “signification”. In doing so, Lacan reveals that between-two there is a third whose status has no longer any ontological let alone dialectical consistency, and that we are essentially exposed to the causation of a fourth.