The Letter, Issue 41, Summer 2009, Pages 127 - 131
Response to Tom Dalzell
Christian Fierens
Christian Fierens argues in this paper against understanding Lacan's exception as a transcendental reality and, preferring L'Etourdit's topological approach to Lacan's geometric one in 1958, he contends that Schreber was right to foreclose the exception since “Schema I” is the truth of “Schema R”.
Keywords: L'Etourdit; exception; Name-of-the-Father; topology; phallus
First of all, we must consider how we think. It always difficult to get rid of “transcendental realism”: we too easily consider that when we say “there exists an x not phi of x”, then there exists in reality “an x not phi of x”; in a similar way, when we are speaking about a “psychotic”, we consider that the psychosis exists as the reality of this person.
To consider that there exists an exception or that there exists a psychotic as a reality independently of our thinking (and that we afterwards come to think about it) is already to give to this reality a power which undermines all our thinking.