The Logical Status of Lacan's "Formulae of Sexuation"

In Seminar XI, Lacan claims that the epistemological ambition of his research is to constitute psychoanalysis as a science, based on the fundamental postulate that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'.[6] This 'conjectural science of the subject'[7] however, has a distinctive object, which is identified with a break in regularity. Furthermore, a scientific object is abstracted from the Real of nature and symbolised mathematically, whereas the object of psychoanalysis, the cause of the subject, is the remainder of the operation of symbolisation.[8] Within a mathematically formalised discourse, the determinations of the object are systematic - that is, the object only exists as a mathematical abstraction with a logical discourse.…