Lacan with Aristotle

Abstract

In Science and Truth, Lacan employs Aristotelian causes to delineate the structural differences between magic, religion, science, and psychoanalysis. To each of them, he assigns one of the Aristotelian causes, identifying the incidence of the signifier as the material cause of the practice Freud invented. This cause can be understood as the truth residing in the neurotic’s suffering – namely, the divided subject who, throughout life, must grapple with their irredeemably premature state, which Freud refers to as Hilflosigkeit. This brief essay aims to use the concept of truth as cause as a means to interpret the four famous discourses developed in the seventeenth Seminar. It seeks to show that if, in lieu of the agent, the other, the product, and the truth, we insert – rotating them by a quarter turn – magic, religion, science, and psychoanalysis, the same relations of inclusion and exclusion that govern these discourses are also in force within what we can consider as the modi operandi of human behavior.