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Philosophy After Lacan; edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and Reza
Naderi
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“[A] marvellous collection of essays testifying to the vitality and timeliness of

Lacan’s ideas.”
Adrian Johnston, Distinguished Professor, Department of Philosophy,
University of New Mexico.

“The contributions in this volume, meticulously edited, show how the practice
of philosophy looks like, when Lacan’s challenge is taken seriously, that is,
beyond provocation.”
Samo Tomšič, Professor of Philosophy, University of Fine Arts Hamburg.

“Moving across fields as diverse as neuroscience, theology, mathematics,

continental philosophy, linguistics and politics, this incredible collection –
a veritable dream team of Lacanian thinkers and scholars – demonstrates
how the multiple trajectories of Lacanian anti-philosophy have inflected
contemporary thought today in a way which is both irreversible and
profound.”
Derek Hook, Associate Professor of Psychology, Duquesne University; editor,
Lacan on Depression and Melancholia (with Stijn Vanheule).
Philosophy After Lacan; edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and Reza
Naderi
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Philosophy After Lacan

Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science, and Art brings together reflections
on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in dialogue with Lacanian
theory.
Rather than focus on the thinkers who came before Lacan, the editors
maintain attention on innovations in contemporary philosophy that owe
their emergence to complimentary, critical, direct, or tangential engagement
with Lacan. This collection makes one of the first concerted efforts to
expand discussions between psychoanalysis and more recent philosophical
thinkers while gathering chapters by some of the leading philosophical voices
of the present moment. With contributors from around the world, this book
has international appeal and is unique in its emphasis on contemporary
philosophies inspired or influenced by Lacan.
Philosophy After Lacan will appeal not only to psychotherapists and psy-
choanalysts, but also to students and professors of philosophy, critical
theory, psychology, politics, history and literature.

Alireza Taheri is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist based in Toronto,

Canada. He is a faculty member of Persepolis Psychoanalytic and the
Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Hegelian-
Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness (Routledge)
where he develops a novel dialectical theory based on Hegel, Lacan and
Žižek.

Chris Vanderwees is a psychoanalyst, registered psychotherapist, and clinical

supervisor at St. John the Compassionate Mission in Toronto, Canada. He is
a member of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis and an affiliate of the
Toronto Psychoanalytic Society.

Reza Naderi is a computer scientist and an author and researcher in the

areas of logic, mathematical philosophy and theories of the subject.
Philosophy After Lacan; edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and Reza
Naderi
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The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series

Series Editor
Ian Parker, Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix

Psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical work is always embedded in specific

linguistic and cultural contexts and carries their traces, traces which this
series attends to in its focus on multiple contradictory and antagonistic ‘lines
of the Symbolic’. This series takes its cue from Lacan’s psychoanalytic work
on three registers of human experience, the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the
Real, and employs this distinctive understanding of cultural, communication
and embodiment to link with other traditions of cultural, clinical and theo-
retical practice beyond the Lacanian symbolic universe. The Lines of the
Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series provides a reflexive reworking of theore-
tical and practical issues, translating psychoanalytic writing from different
contexts, grounding that work in the specific histories and politics that pro-
vide the conditions of possibility for its descriptions and interventions to
function. The series makes connections between different cultural and dis-
ciplinary sites in which psychoanalysis operates, questioning the idea that
there could be one single correct reading and application of Lacan. Its
authors trace their own path, their own line through the Symbolic, situating
psychoanalysis in relation to debates which intersect with Lacanian work,
explicating it, extending it and challenging it.

A Lacanian Conception of Populism

Society Does Not Exist
Timothy Appleton

On the History and Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Speaking of Lacan
Chris Vanderwees

Lacan and Capitalist Discourse

Neoliberalism and Ideology
Jorge Alemán

Philosophy After Lacan

Politics, Science, and Art
Edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees, and Reza Naderi

For more information about the series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

The-Lines-of-the-Symbolic-in-Psychoanalysis-Series/book-series/KARNLOS
Philosophy After Lacan; edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and Reza
Naderi
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Philosophy After Lacan

Politics, Science, and Art

Edited by
Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and
Reza Naderi
Philosophy After Lacan; edited by Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees and Reza
Naderi
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Times New Roman;
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First published 2024

by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 selection and editorial matter, Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees, and
Reza Naderi; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Alireza Taheri, Chris Vanderwees, and Reza Naderi to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Designed cover image: René Magritte, "La Lampe philosophique"
["Philosopher's Lamp"], 1936
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-1-032-54646-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-54645-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-42595-3 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003425953

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

Acknowledgements ix
List of Contributors x
Preface xiii

Introduction 1
1 Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy: Why True Atheism has to be
Indirect 7
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

2 My Transference with Lacan as a Thinker 27

SERGIO BENVENUTO

3 The Psychiatrist Despite Himself 45

ALIREZA TAHERI

4 How Not to Kill a Hysteric 68

JAMIESON WEBSTER

5 Feed My Desire: Occupy Wall Street and the Prospect of a

Lacanian Gay Science 83
DANIEL ADLEMAN

6 Doomsday Fantasy: The Logic of Logistical Blocking of the Left 95

ARIAN BEHZADI

7 Real Ethics and the “Ethics of the Real” after Lacan and
Wittgenstein 109
PAUL M. LIVINGSTON

8 Lacan with Derrida 127

CHRIS VANDERWEES
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viii Contents

9 “Lacan is Our Hegel”: Dialectic from Hegel to Lacan to Badiou 142

REZA NADERI

10 The Place of Mathematics: Badiou with Lacan 167

JELICA ŠUMIČ RIHA

11 The Logic of Institutions in Lacanian Psychoanalysis 197

GABRIEL TUPINAMBÁ

Index 213
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Acknowledgements

We thank Ian Parker for his generous support of this project. We also thank
Susannah Frearson for her help throughout the publishing process. This
work was born out of a fraternal bond with our dear friends and comrades
Arian Behzadi, Hossein Zarassi and Doug Orr, with whom we enjoyed reg-
ular discussions around philosophical and psychoanalytic readings. We owe
them many thanks for inspiring exchanges over the last few years.
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Contributors

Daniel Adleman is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the

University of Toronto, where he teaches Digital Rhetoric, A Brief History
of Persuasion, Writing for Social Change and Rhetoric of Health and
Medicine. He has published articles in Cultural Politics, Cultural Studies,
Communication +1, Canadian Review of American Studies and European
Journal of Psychoanalysis. Along with Chris Vanderwees, he is the co-
author of Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric: Freud, Burke, Lacan and
Philosophy’s Other Scenes (Routledge, 2023).
Arian Behzadi is an attending psychiatrist and trauma clinic lead in the
Mental Health and Addiction Program, Scarborough Health Network in
Toronto, Canada. He is also a psychoanalyst in training with the Toronto
Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He teaches at the University of Tor-
onto and the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society.
Sergio Benvenuto is a psychoanalyst in Rome, president of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Psychoanalysis, founder and former editor of the
European Journal of Psychoanalysis and a researcher in psychology and
philosophy at the National Research Council in Rome. He is a member of
the Institute of Sciences and Technologies of Cognition at the Italian
Council for Scientific Research. He teaches psychoanalysis at the Interna-
tional Institute of the Psychology in Kiev and at Esculapio Specialization
in Psychotherapy in Naples. He is a contributor to cultural and scientific
journals such as Lettre Internationale, L’évolution psychiatrique, DIVI-
SION/Review.
Paul M. Livingston lives in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and tea-
ches philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of
several books, most recently The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein,
and the Consequences of Formalism (2012), The Problems of Contemporary
Philosophy (co-authored with Andrew Cutrofello, 2015) and The Logic of
Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (2017). His current project is an investi-
gation of several logics of the one and the many, primarily as these appear
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List of contributors xi

in the traditions of Platonism, Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy and

twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and of their implications for con-
temporary life and practice.
Reza Naderi has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the European Graduate School
and a B.Sc. in computer science and pure mathematics from the Uni-
versity of Toronto. Reza’s doctoral supervisor and committee chair was
Alain Badiou. Reza is a computer scientist and practitioner interested in
mathematics, mathematical philosophy, logic, politics and psychoanalysis.
His research focuses on the cross sections of the theory of large cardinals
and the theory of the subject. He has authored a book titled Badiou, Infi-
nity and Subjectivity − Reading Hegel and Lacan after Badiou, which
Lexington will soon publish. He has also published articles about fuzzy
logic, model theory and politics. Reza is a member of the international
research collective Subset of Theoretical Practice (STP) and has con-
tributed to several publications by STP, including Atlas of Experimental
Politics (Šuma #17, 2021).
Jelica Šumič Riha is a Professor of Philosophy at the Postgraduate School of
Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and a
Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of
the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was a visiting professor
at the University of Essex, University Paris 8, Universidad de Buenos
Aires and University of São Paulo. In 2000–02 she conducted a seminar,
“Le pour tous face au réel” at the Collège international de philosophie in
Paris (together with Rado Riha). She has published a number of philoso-
phical works, including Politik der Wahrheit (with Alain Badiou, Jacques
Rancière and Rado Riha), Turia+Kant (Vienna, 1997), Universel, Singu-
lier, Sujet (with Alain Badiou et al., Kimé, Paris, 2000); Mutations of
Ethics (Založba ZRC, 2002); Večnost in spreminjanje. Filozofija v brezs-
vetnem času (Eternity and Change. Philosophy in the Worldless Time,
Založba ZRC, Ljubljana 2012); A politíca e a psicanálise: do nao-todo ao
para todos (Lume editor, São Paulo, 2019). Currently she is working on a
forthcoming volume entitled Volonté et Désir (Harmattan).
Alireza Taheri wrote his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan
at the University of Cambridge. He currently provides psychoanalytic
psychotherapy and clinical supervision in Toronto where he is also actively
involved teaching psychoanalysis at the Toronto Psychoanalytic Institute
and Society. Alireza is a faculty member of Persepolis Psychoanalytic
where he teaches psychoanalytic theory and practice to students in Tehran
(Iran). He is also a faculty member of the Boston Graduate School of
Psychoanalysis where he teaches Lacanian theories of psychosis as well as
courses on philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is engaged in writing arti-
cles and books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, film and literature. Alireza
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xii List of contributors

has recently published a monograph with Routledge entitled Hegelian-

Lacanian Variations on Late Modernity: Spectre of Madness, where he
develops a novel dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and
Žižek. Alireza’s current research focuses on Lacanian theories of psychosis
and autism about which he is preparing a monograph.
Gabriel Tupinambá is a practicing psychoanalyst in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
He is also the Head of Social Strategy at the Alameda Institute and a
member of the international research collective Subset of Theoretical
Practice. He is the author of The Desire of Psychoanalysis (NUP, 2021)
and the co-author of An Architecture of Edges: The Left in times of world
peripherization (Autonomia, 2022) and Hegel, Lacan, Žižek (Atropos,
2013).
Chris Vanderwees is a psychoanalyst, registered psychotherapist and clinical
supervisor in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of On the History and
Transmission of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2024), co-author
with Daniel Adleman of Psychoanalysis and the New Rhetoric (Routledge,
2023), co-editor with Kristen Hennessy of Psychoanalysis, Politics,
Oppression and Resistance (Routledge, 2022) and translator of Betty
Milan’s Analyzed by Lacan (Bloomsbury, 2023). He is also an affiliate of
the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the Lacanian School
of Psychoanalysis.
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She is the author of
The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011), Conversion Disorder
(Columbia University Press, 2018) and Disorganization & Sex (Divided,
2022); she also co-wrote, with Simon Critchley, Stay, Illusion! The Hamlet
Doctrine (Pantheon, 2013). She contributes regularly to Artforum, Spike
Art Magazine, Apology and the New York Review of Books.
Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, a Lacanian psychoanalyst and a
communist. He is the International Director at the Birkbeck Institute for
Humanities, University of London, UK, a Visiting Professor at the New
York University, USA, and a Senior Researcher at the Department of
Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
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Naderi
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Preface

Psychoanalysis concerns itself with otherness, and encounters many other

kinds of others in its engagement with the field of the symbolic, marking
itself out as a distinctive form of practice if not knowledge; one of the most
powerful other forms of supposed knowledge and reflective questioning we
encounter is philosophy. What ‘philosophy’ is exactly, however, is as appar-
ently numinous as psychoanalysis; at the one moment philosophy appeals to
commonsensical understandings of the self and external reality, dabbling in
imaginary appeals to what is felt or said, and at the other, sometimes even in
the self-same philosophical paradigm, it delves deep, aiming to touch some-
thing that cannot be put into words, something of the real. In its manifold
forms, then, philosophy is often an alluring temptation to psychoanalysts
that promises to complete psychoanalysis and answer the questions that
psychoanalysis cannot.
This multi-faceted volume sticks with the questions, with the reflective
questioning that is at the heart of psychoanalytic practice, rather than pre-
tending to come up with answers, rather than pretending to triumph over
philosophy; this is crucial, for to engage in that kind of battle would be to
fight on the field of the enemy and so, from the start, to lose everything.
What there is of psychoanalysis to hold steadfast to is marked in the title of
this book in three terms, ‘politics’, ‘science’ and ‘art’, and in a fourth term
that is presupposed, operating, as it were, in the shadows; this fourth term,
‘love’, is hinted at in the introduction to the book as an opening to either a
philosophy or an anti-philosophy.
Each of the authors in this field of work – a field adjacent to, if not
immediately on the same terrain of philosophy – is mindful of a risk, that the
kind of coordinates that Lacanian psychoanalysis gives us to speak about
‘philosophical’ questions should thereby lead us into making claims about
others that would either obey their precepts or attempt to subsume them
under psychoanalysis operating as a totalising worldview. In the case of
‘politics’, for instance, the question must be held open, rather than answered,
as to whether it is possible to provide a psychoanalysis of politics – a reduc-
tive trap – or whether we should attend to the politics of psychoanalysis.
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xiv Preface

There is an equivalent risk in relation to ‘science’, a risk that has a long

history in academic and informal philosophy, symbolic and imaginary, which
is that as psychoanalysts we might attempt to answer the same kinds of
questions that many philosophers have grappled with. There lie the pitfalls of
empiricism and positivism which would tie down what reality is, even specify
what is real and what is not. So here, again, the question must be kept open
as to whether psychoanalysis must become scientific or whether science must
be subjected to psychoanalytic scrutiny.
In the case of ‘art’ we are tasked with asking what kind of practice psy-
choanalysis is if it is not to be defined as a science. This question pertains not
only to the aesthetic aspect of psychoanalysis, an aspect that does draw many
practitioners and adepts close to it, but also to the more austere logical
structure of psychoanalytic argument. Just as the philosophy of art has
tended to obscure the ways in which philosophical argumentation as such
has an alluring artistic quality, so we also need to be aware of the difference
between turning psychoanalysis into an art practice and subjecting art to a
psychoanalytic grid.
This book holds in abeyance, while suggestively hinting at the place of
‘love’ as a fourth ‘truth procedure’. Here is a driving force in psychoanalytic
theory and practice, one that manifests itself in the attempt by psycho-
analysts to explain exactly what love is – an explanation that philosophy has
also attempted to provide and failed at – and in the transferential hold that
psychoanalysis has over so many of us, the love of psychoanalysis.
Psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical work circulates through multiple
intersecting antagonistic symbolic universes. This series opens connections
between different cultural sites in which Lacanian work has developed in
distinctive ways, in forms of work that question the idea that there could be
single correct reading and application. The Lines of the Symbolic in Psycho-
analysis series provides a reflexive reworking of psychoanalysis that transmits
Lacanian writing from around the world, steering a course between the
temptations of a metalanguage and imaginary reduction, between the claim
to provide a God’s eye view of psychoanalysis and the idea that psycho-
analysis must everywhere be the same. And the elaboration of psychoanalysis
in the symbolic here grounds its theory and practice in the history and poli-
tics of the work in a variety of interventions that touch the real.

Ian Parker
Manchester Psychoanalytic Matrix
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Introduction

Throughout his teaching, which spanned over several decades, French psy-
chiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan put forward a novel reading of
Freud while drawing upon numerous fields including linguistics, anthro-
pology, mathematical formalisation, topology, philosophy and literature.
Many academic papers and books have been dedicated to Lacan’s complex
and intricate relationship with the philosophers that shaped his thinking such
as Socrates, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Koyré and Sartre. These
major figures among others comprise the long list of Lacan’s philosophical
interlocutors. There are several texts, for instance, that engage with Lacan
and philosophy including Ellie Ragland’s Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy
of Psychoanalysis from 1986, but this book mainly focuses on Lacanian
psychoanalysis as a kind of philosophy and concerning historical philoso-
phical ideas. Ruth Ronen’s recent Lacan with the Philosophers (2018) also
does not emphasise Lacan’s contemporary influence and instead takes up
canonical thinkers including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, and Hegel.
Although Russell Grigg’s Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (2008) does dis-
cuss the work of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, this book mainly limits its
scope to Lacan’s work to the “linguistic turn” in psychoanalysis. Finally,
French-language edited volumes and monographs also consider the Lacanian
corpus concerning its philosophical inheritance rather than what Lacan has
himself bequeathed to contemporary thinkers. We are thinking specifically
about Juranville’s monograph entitled Lacan et la philosophie and the col-
lection of papers entitled Lacan avec les philosophes where contemporary
thinkers reflect once again on Lacan’s engagement with previous philoso-
phers. Therefore, the project we propose is unique in its focus on con-
temporary philosophies inspired or influenced by Lacan.
In this edited collection, Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science and Art,
we bring together reflections on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in
dialogue with Lacanian theory. Rather than focus on the thinkers who came
before Lacan, we maintain our focus on innovations in contemporary philo-
sophy that owe their emergence to complimentary, critical, direct or tangen-
tial engagement with Lacan. This collection makes one of the first concerted
DOI: 10.4324/9781003425953-1
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Naderi
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2 Philosophy After Lacan

effects to expand discussions between psychoanalysis and more recent philo-

sophical thinkers while gathering chapters by some of the leading philoso-
phical voices of our present moment.
In “Lacan’s Lesson for Philosophy: Why True Atheism Has to Be Indir-
ect”, Žižek explores the basic premise of atheists today, which is that mate-
rialism is a view which can be consistently exposed and defended in itself, in
a positive line of argumentation without references to its opposite (religious
beliefs). But what if the exact opposite is true? What if, if we want to be true
atheists, we have to begin with a religious edifice and undermine it from
within? To say that God is deceiving, evil, stupid, undead etc. is much more
radical than to directly claim that there is no god: if we just posit that god
doesn’t exist, we open up the way towards its de facto survival as an idea that
should regulate our lives.
In “The Transference with Lacan as a Thinker”, Sergio Benvenuto con-
fesses his dissatisfaction with those philosophies that refer directly to Lacan,
while he appreciates the many criticisms and analyses of philosophers who
have measured themselves with Lacan’s work (i.e., Derrida, Nancy, Lacoue-
Labarthe, and others). In particular, he rejects what he calls Freudo-Laca-
nian Marxism, recalling how much Freud and Lacan distanced themselves
from the Communist Gospel. Lacan’s reintegration into militant (anti-capi-
talist, feminist, queer, avant-garde…) thought took place by inscribing
Lacan’s work in an essentially Hegelian vision, in short, by making it a
modernist variant of idealism. Benvenuto exposes what seems to him impor-
tant about Lacan’s contribution beyond psychoanalysis – he does not label
himself at all as Lacanian – proposing a “realist” reading of his thought and
reading it against the backlight of Wittgenstein’s thought. In particular, he
valorises concepts that even Lacanians often tend to abandon, such as the
power of the signifier, the crucial problematique of après-coup, the subject/
Other opposition, the emergence of the real in its correlation with the sym-
bolic, the centrality of the category of enjoyment. Instead, Lacanian logo-
centrism should be abandoned. The author does not consider Lacan’s as a
complete and closed system, but as a tormented and always self-dissatisfied
reflection on psychoanalysis and its practice. He does not believe that
Lacan’s teaching is a Revelation that provides answers but is an original (and
sometimes mistaken) way of posing the crucial questions of psychoanalysis in
a fresh and new way.
In “The Psychiatrist Despite Himself: How Sganarelle Parodied the Uni-
versity Discourse without Knowing It”, Alireza Taheri delivers his message
in the form of a play inspired by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière’s Le Méde-
cin malgrè lui (The Doctor Despite Himself). The original piece by Molière
satirises medicine by showing how an uneducated working-class man (Sga-
narelle) dupes people into thinking he is a learned doctor by feigning
knowledge. In a similar vein, Taheri creates a play where Sganarelle is sum-
moned to pretend to be a psychiatrist through a similar ruse of posturing
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erudition. The aim of the play is to parody not only the follies of modern
American psychiatry but, more generally, the idiocies of what Lacan has
termed the “university discourse”, namely the covert use of power in the
guise of knowledge and science. A call is made in the play to move beyond
the limitations of the university discourse not only in mental health but also
in economics, metaphysics, ethics, and matters pertaining to justice. A
thinking that places the notion of the symptom at its heart is heralded as the
remedy freeing modernity from the clutches of the university discourse.
In “Listening to Hysteria”, Jamiseon Webster argues that there is some-
thing annoying about the celebrated (or denigrated) muteness, disappearing
acts, or unspoken bodily protest attributed to hysterical women at this point
in psychoanalytic history. Any analyst who has worked with a hysteric knows
the intense intricacy of what comes to be said, the incredible work of analysis
that she performs, no less the process of encountering, again and again,
some kernel of trauma, the very limits of understanding, that tends to
bring the analysis towards> its final moments. Why emphasise what is
merely the symptomatic starting point? Why not describe the ferocious
intelligence of some hysterical patients when it comes to analytic work, no
less their intelligence in relation to their analysts, something that has often
been called clairvoyant, even if defensive − let’s talk about you? What
other treatments are as maddening, mystifying, and magical? And what
about the hysteric’s politics, so variably celebrated as radical, feminist, or
disparaged as submissive, conservative? This also seems to miss the mark of
what takes place in analytic work; though the question, no less how it is
conceptualised, is not impertinent for the future of the institution of psy-
choanalysis. What could a more hysterical psychoanalysis look like, and is
that even something we want in the 21st century? In this chapter, looking at
an analyst analyzing hysteria (Kristeva), a hysterical analyst (Montrelay) and
the hysterical analysand turned analyst (Tustin) Webster will try to get closer
to this vision.
In “Feed My Desire: Occupy Wall Street and the Prospect of a Lacanian
Gay Science”, Daniel Adleman argues that the 2011 Occupy Wall Street
(OWS) protest was a remarkable watershed for radical subjectivity and poli-
tical theorisation. His chapter examines Lee Edelman’s application of Laca-
nian theory to this momentous event. Bringing Lacan’s formulation of the
death drive into conversation with Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scri-
vener”, Edelman alleges that the antisocial Real dimension of OWS was, in
fact, the mainspring of its political efficacy. Against the grain of popular
wisdom, Edelman argues that if OWS were to be absorbed into the dominant
order of things and translated into a campaign to improve humanity’s lot,
the movement would lose its thanatotic potency in the process of assimilating
into the homogenizing capitalist network it was meant to short circuit.
According to Edelman, the “queer” drive function of the event must be
understood as a “negativity that prefers not to pledge itself to the goal of a
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4 Philosophy After Lacan

new community and declines its positivization in a recognizably political

agenda”. Adleman argues that while Edelman’s breathtaking psychoanalytic
critique of shallow neoliberal discourse cuts deep, his prescriptions neglect
the manifold ways that the Occupy movement has already metamorphosed
into a project oriented towards a better future for the 99%. Adleman’s chap-
ter makes the case that, in mapping his model of antisocial queerness onto
social movements, Edelman perhaps overhastily dichotomises OWS’s itiner-
ary as either potently disruptive (yet without an agenda) or counter-
productively oriented towards a future that reproduces the neoliberal
conditions its progenitors revile. Looking to the psychoanalytically-informed
political theories of Jodi Dean, Žižek, Glen Coulthard and others, Adleman
presents an alternate array of Lacanian perspectives on the significance of
OWS and subsequent waves of twenty-first-century political activism.
In “Doomsday Fantasy: The Logic of Logistical Blocking of the Left”,
Arian Behzadi asks if it is possible that something that has not yet been sig-
nified, something that is ‘blocking’ the full emergence of its significance in
the political field, is connected to the repetitive puritanism of the Left? Could
this ‘something’ be a very private state of essential hopelessness, a secret,
delusional, and melancholic state − something we are compelled to call a
fantasy, specifically, the ‘doomsday fantasy’? This is the melancholic belief
that not only will everything end but that ‘things are already over'. The
Lacanian structural analysis of the subject will be applied to elaborate on the
melancholic state within the left: ‘the left-wing melancholia'.
In “Philosophical Ethics and Real of Ethics after Lacan and Wittgen-
stein”, Paul M. Livingston refers to Lacan’s 1959–60 seminar The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, who notably specifies the psychoanalytic perspective as one
on which “the question of ethics is to be articulated from the point of view of
the location of man in relation to the real". Livingston argues that in the
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein declares that “ethics is trans-
cendental” and, while holding that there can be no propositions of descrip-
tive or normative ethics, he nevertheless interrogates sympathetically “drive
to run up against the boundaries of language”, which he associates with the
ethical tendency in the 1929 “Lecture on Ethics". The aim of this chapter is
to articulate how both conceptions of ethics as occupying a liminal position
with respect to the totality of the symbolic can succeed in formulating what
might be called (in contradistinction to “academic” or “philosophical”
ethics) a real ethics: that is, an ethics that can comprehend and find terms to
respond to the real ethical problems of global sociopolitical organisation
today, including those involved in the global dominance of capitalism and
anthropogenic violence over non-human forms of life. Livingston argues
that, for both Lacan and the early Wittgenstein, the drive to the ethical
evinces an essential tendency, inherent to our situation as speaking subjects
as such, to witness the implications of our position as such subjects with
respect to the totality of the symbolic. The articulation that both give to this
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limit-position with respect to the symbolic allows their respective analytic

projects to evince the terms in which a real ethics might begin to respond to
the systematic real and symbolic violence, grounded in the totalizing effects
of capitalism and symbolic enframing, that dominates collective planetary
life today.
In “Derrida with Lacan”, Chris Vanderwees turns our attention toward
Derrida’s presentation entitled “For the Love of Lacan”, which is a text that
posits provocative exclamations about the Lacanian archive. From the posi-
tion of deconstructionist, Derrida asks us to call into question what we think
we know about Lacan. Here, Vanderwees explores Derrida’s personal
encounters with Lacan and the question of the Lacanian archive. In this text,
Derrida takes aim at several theorisations of Lacanian psychoanalysis
including the notion of the proper trajectory of the letter as returning to the
place that reinscribes lack, the motif of truth being formulated as an unveil-
ing, the transcendental place assigned to the phallus, and the phono-logo-
centrism or phallogocentrism contained in Lacan’s work. Vanderwees follows
Derrida’s lead to raise new questions for the contemporary scene.
In ““Lacan is Our Hegel”: Dialectic, from Hegel to Lacan to Badiou”,
Reza Naderi hones in on the quotation by Badiou in his 1982 book Theory
of the Subject where Badiou states that Lacan is our Hegel. His statement is
meant in terms of admiration for Lacan’s work to advance the Hegelian
dialectic and critical reading of Lacan. Contrary to the popular belief that
Marxism was the heir to Hegel’s dialectical thought, Badiou believed Lacan
was the only true heir to Hegel’s dialectic. More importantly, in the same
way, that Lacan split Hegel to extract the rational kernel of the Hegelian
dialectic, we must split Lacan to extract the rational kernel of the Lacanian
dialectic. In this chapter, Naderi reviews Badiou’s account by focusing on the
splitting operation of Hegel by Lacan and of Lacan by Badiou. Naderi will
also show why this early interest in dialectics played an essential role in
forming Badiou’s later thoughts toward ontology and the theory of the
discipline.
In “The Place of Mathematics in Badiou and Lacan”, Jelica Šumič Riha
attempts to give an account of two different ways of relating to mathematics:
Lacan’s and Badiou’s. Riha’s starting point is Badiou’s and Lacan’s inter-
pretation of Russell’s infamous definition of mathematics, according to which
mathematics is a discourse in which no one knows what one is talking about,
nor whether what one is saying is true. While for Badiou, the ignorance that
is supposed to characterise mathematics according to Russell only concerns
the role philosophy assigns to it, namely, its being identified with the science
of being qua being, for Lacan the ignorance constitutive of mathematics is
rather to be seen as a symptom resulting from the reduction of truth to a
mere truth value. In discussing the detected divergences in these two read-
ings, this chapter shows how the access to psychoanalysis as well as the
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6 Philosophy After Lacan

access to philosophy coincides with a certain access to mathematics, although

we are not dealing with the same type of access.
In “A History of the Big Other: Lacan, Anthropology and Historical
Materialism”, Gabriel Tupinambá enquires into why did psychoanalysis
emerge when it did – and what is its debt to these historical conditions? In
this chapter, Tupinambá proposes a philosophical hypothesis which includes
psychoanalysis in the history of the transformations of the logic of affinity
and kinship under the consolidation of capitalist modernity. In a critical
dialogue with anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Tupinambá sug-
gests that one of the characteristic traits of modern sociality is that kinship
structures organizing human social reproduction do not constitute a
common “world”, conditioning the emergence of social practices that recog-
nise and intervene upon what Lacan called “individual myths” that we need
to create in order to suture our fractured kinship histories into social reality.
This thesis is quite acceptable in its content, but it is the form in which it is
proposed – using resources from Kojin Karatani’s theory of the modes of
intercourse and Badiou’s formal theory of world-logic – that claims some
originality, especially since it allows us to derive some crucial ideas, such as
Lacan’s theory of the real, symbolic and imaginary registers, or his theory of
sexuation, out of a more general conceptual framework, itself compatible
with the basic tenets of historical materialism.
The vast spectrum of themes in this collection addresses some of the most
pressing philosophical questions today. Some chapters engage directly with
questions pertaining to psychoanalytic theory and practice while others delve
into social, political, and institutional perspectives in light of psychoanalytic
theory and contemporary philosophical influences. In direct dialogue with
Lacanian psychoanalysis, these chapters put forward the full spectrum of
Badiouian truth procedures, namely love, science, art and politics. While
some papers focus more on the truth “conditions” of philosophy, others are
more directly philosophical. While this Badiouian twist is an unintended
outcome of the collection, we welcome it as a serendipitous result, signalling
to us the intimate kinship between psychoanalysis and philosophy and her-
alding the idea of a future collection on Badiou and psychoanalysis as a
specular mirror to this volume.
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Chapter 1

Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy

Why True Atheism has to be Indirect
Slavoj Žižek

I am not only politically active but often, as they say, also perceived as poli-
tically radioactive. The idea that political theology necessarily underpins
radical emancipatory politics will for certain add to this perception. The
basic premise of atheists today is that materialism is a view which can be
consistently exposed and defended in itself, in a positive line of argumenta-
tion without references to is opposite (religious beliefs). But what if the exact
opposite is true? What if, if we want to be true atheists, we have to begin
with a religious edifice and undermine it from within? To say that god is
deceiving, evil, stupid, undead… is much more radical than to directly claim
that there is no god: if we just posit that god doesn’t exist, we open up the
way towards its de facto survival as an idea(l) that should regulate our lives.
Why political theology? Why are so many essays entitled “politico-theolo-
gical treatise”? The answer is that a theory becomes theology when it is part
of a full subjective political engagement. Let’s mention three examples: love,
religion, Marxism. If there is a free choice it is that of a love object, love
cannot be imposed; however, once fully in love, we experience love as our
fate – it holds us in its clutches, no matter how hard we try we cannot escape
it. This is why we can (usually) enumerate reasons why we fell in love, but
these reasons appears as reasons only after we are already in love – we are
never in a comfortable external position in which we can compare reasons to
fall in love with different persons and decide whom to choose. Kierkegaard
says exactly the same about faith: I do not acquire faith in, say, Christ after
comparing different religions and deciding the best reasons speak for Chris-
tianity – there are reasons to choose Christianity but this reasons appear only
after I’ve already chosen it, i.e., to see the reasons for belief one already has
to believe. And the same holds for Marxism: it is not that, after objectively
analysing history, I became a Marxist – my decision to be a Marxist (the
experience of a proletarian position) makes me see the reasons for it, i.e.,
Marxism is the paradox of an objective “true” knowledge accessible only
through a subjective partial position. This is why Robespierre was right when
he distrusted materialism as the philosophy of decadent-hedonist nobility
and tried to impose a new religion of the supreme Being of Reason. The old
DOI: 10.4324/9781003425953-2
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8 Philosophy After Lacan

reproach to Marxism that its commitment to a bright future is a secularisa-

tion of religious salvation should be proudly assumed.
Here I am ready to use Lorenzo Chiesa’s term of an irreducible oscilla-
tion1: radical emancipatory politics is condemned to oscillate between
moments of ecstatic religious commitment where we suspend “reality princi-
ple” and try to actualise the impossible, and the long hard “pragmatic” pro-
cess of transforming revolutionary goals into moments of ordinary social
reality of the majority. The point is not that moments of ecstatic commit-
ment are simply utopian/destructive and have to be “normalised”: they are
essential since they clear the ground and prepare a new base for pragmatic
solutions. They are also not illusory since we, the engaged agents, are fully
aware that our “impossible” striving will eventually subside, and this aware-
ness only strengthens our commitment. So we don’t oscillate between the
One of full engagement and the cynical acceptance of not-One, of the messy
reality: a true believer can be (and mostly is) ruthlessly cynical about his/her
predicament, but this awareness only strengthens his/her commitment − this
is the political version of Tertullian’s credo qua absurdum est.
Most of us know well the culminating moment of A Few Good Men (Rob
Reiner, 1992), when Tom Cruise addresses Jack Nicholson with “I want the
truth!”, and Nicholson shouts back: “You can’t handle the truth!” This reply
is more ambiguous than it may appear: it should not be taken as simply
claiming that most of us are too weak to handle the brutal reality of things.
We have to get rid of the metaphor of the Real as the hard core of reality (the
way things “really are in themselves”) accessible to us only through multiple
lenses of how we symbolise reality, of how we construct it through our fan-
tasies and cognitive biases. In the opposition between reality (“hard facts”)
and fantasies (illusions, symbolic constructs), the Real is on the side of illu-
sions and fantasies: the Real, of course, by definition resists full symbolisa-
tion, but it is at the same time an excess generated by the process of
symbolisation itself. Without symbolisation, there is no Real, there is just a
flat stupidity of what is there. Another (perhaps the ultimate) example: if
someone were to ask a witness about the truth of the holocaust, and the
witness were to reply “You can’t handle the truth!”, this should not be
understood as a simple claim that most of us are not able the process the
horror of holocaust. At a deeper level, those who were not able to handle the
truth were the Nazi perpetrators themselves: they were not able to handle the
truth that their society is traversed by an all-encompassing antagonism, and
to avoid this insight they engaged in the murdering spray that targeted the
Jews, as if killing the Jews would re-establish a harmonious social body.
What nonetheless complicates the things even more is that the “truth”
evoked by Nicholson is not simply the reality of how things stand but a more
precise fact that our power (not just the military) has to follow illegal
unwritten rules and practices (the “Code Red” in the film) to sustain its legal
system – this is the truth soft liberals are not able to handle.
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Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy 9

We are thereby touching the delicate topic of the relationship between

truth and lie. A rather boring sexual joke nonetheless concludes with an
interesting final spin. A wife asks her husband to run to a nearby drugstore
to buy her a package of cigarettes. He goes there, but since it is already late
evening, the store is closed, so he goes to a nearby bar to get a package. A
voluptuous young woman is serving at the bar, they get into a flirting con-
versation and end up in a bed in her nearby apartment. After a couple of
hours of passionate love making, he begins to worry how he will explain his
long absence to his wife; then he gets an idea – he asks the woman if she has
some baby powder, and rubs it into his hands. When he arrives home, the
wife is furiously awaiting him and asks where he was; he replies: “The drug-
store was already closed, so I went to a nearby bar to get the package. I got
into a flirting conversation with a voluptuous young woman who was serving
at the bar, and we ended up in a bed in her nearby apartment. After a couple
of hours of passionate love, I finally returned home…” “You dirty liar!”
interrupts him the wife: “You think I didn’t notice the powder on your
hands! You did what you wanted for a long time but I prohibited it, you went
to a night session of bowling with your friends!” This is a correct Hegelian
reversal: when one is in a situation where even an outright lie will not be
convincing, one should tell the truth and create conditions which will guar-
antee that the truth itself will be perceived as a lie…
Adrian Johnston addresses precisely this concoction of truth and lies in his
question: “Is atheism condemned to remaining eternally, in Hegelian terms, a
determinate negation of Christianity − and, hence, permanently dependent
or parasitic upon what it negates? Can one move from sublating (as Aufhe-
bung) religion to finally outright negating it? Is Judeo-Christian monotheism
the disposable ladder of a thoroughly historical possibility condition for
atheism? Or, is it an indispensable logical necessity for making possible all
future atheisms?”2 The answer to this question should be a resounding YES:
atheism cannot stand on its own, a detour through religion is necessary −
not only religion as such, but specifically Christianity is indispensable. If we
throw away the ladder, we lose the thing itself which we arrived to through
this ladder. This is why, in contrast to Freud for whom religiosity is a curable
symptom, for Jacques Lacan it is an incurable sinthome.
So why is the detour through Christianity indispensable? Lacan said that
“the Holy Spirit is a notion infinitely less stupid than that of the subject
supposed to know”3 − why? Because the Holy Spirit does not have to rely on
a subject-supposed-to-know: it can function as the immanent community
(the protestant Gemeinde) which already is what its members are looking for
or devoted to. Chiesa writes: “Christianity transforms such a structural
oscillation into a static dogma, that is, the neat separation between the
abjection of our world and the perfection of the world to come that will have
redeemed it". However, what if we read the return of Christ as something
that already takes place in the Holy Spirit (the community of believers)
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10 Philosophy After Lacan

which takes place in this earthly abject world? There is no oscillation here,
Holy Spirit is an event which just changes the entire constellation.
Such a role of the Holy Spirit affects the identity of God himself. Lacan
asserts that “God does not believe in God", and he immediately spells out
the implications of this claim by way of equating “God does not believe in
God” with “There is something (of the) unconscious (y a d’l’inconscient)".4
The move we have to accomplish here is thus the move from our doubt about
God to God doubting his own divine status, not believing in himself as God.
But where is his non-belief located? Does God consciously doubts his own
divinity? This would have meant that we assert a substantial unconscious
God whose existence is too deep even for his own consciousness. So we
should rather assert the opposite: God cannot consciously doubt himself, he
has to believe he is God, it is unconsciously that he doesn’t believe in himself
(or, more precisely, that he knows he is not a God).
This tension in God himself complicates the status of the divine prohibi-
tion – to quote Chiesa: “for Freud, if the Father of the horde is dead, then
nothing is permitted anymore, since he is turned into God; however, if God
is dead, then everything is potentially permitted, at least in the direction of
the species’ collective self-annihilation". However, the God who prohibits
everything is NOT the God of the real (parallel to the primordial Father) but
precisely the symbolic dead god. When god is proclaimed dead, he returns in
a whole series of pseudo-atheist shapes in which permissiveness itself is ultra-
regulated – just recall how the Political Correctness imposes numerous pro-
hibitions and regulations to guarantee our sexual freedom… This is why,
when Lacan says that “we can do without [God] provided that we use
[Him]",5 this claim is also open to two opposite readings: a cynical one and
an authentically-ethical one. It can mean: we know there is no God but we
manipulatively “use” him as a spectre which enables our peaceful coex-
istence. Or it can mean: fully aware of the God’s inexistence, we endorse this
spectre as a Cause to which we commit our life.
What one should advocate is thus the materialist procedure of the imma-
nent self-undermining of a religious edifice − the claim that god is evil or
stupid can be much more unsettling than the claim that there is no god since
the first claim destroys the very notion of divinity. Let’s take The Rapture
(1991, written and directed by Michael Tolkin) in which Mimi Rogers
superbly plays Sharon, a young LA woman who works during the day as a
phone operator endlessly repeating the same questions in a small cubicle
among dozens of others, while in the evenings she engages in swinging orgies.
Bored and dissatisfied at leading such an empty life, Sharon becomes a
member of a sect which preaches that the end of times and the Rapture are
imminent; turning into a passionate believer, she begins to practice a new,
pious lifestyle, gets married to Randy, one of her previous swinging partners,
and has a daughter Mary with him. Six years later, when Randy, now also a
devoted Christian, is shot to death by a madman, this senseless catastrophe
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Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy 11

makes her and her daughter even more convinced that the Rapture is soon
approaching. Sharon believes god told her to go with Mary to a nearby
desert camping place and wait there until the two are taken into heaven
where they will be united with Randy. Foster, a well-meaning, nonbelieving
patrol officer, takes care of them there during their long wait when they run
out of food. Mary gets impatient and proposes to her mother that they
simply kill themselves in order to go to heaven and join Randy immediately.
After a couple of weeks, Sharon also loses patience, decides to do the
unspeakable and follows Mary’s advice to stop her suffering; however, after
shooting Mary, she is unable to take her own life afterwards, knowing that
suicides are not allowed into heaven. She confesses her act to Foster who
arrests her and takes her to a local jail…
Until this point, the story moves along “realist” lines, and one can easily
imagine a possible “atheist” ending: bitter and alone, deprived of her faith,
Sharon realises the horror of what she had committed, and is maybe saved by
the good policeman. Here, however, events take a totally unexpected turn: in
the jail cell, Rapture happens, literally, in all naivety, including bad special
effects. First, deep in the night, Mary appears with two angels, and then,
early in the morning, while Sharon sits in her cell, a loud trumpet blast is
heard all around and announces a series of supranatural events − prison bars
fall down, concrete walls fall apart, etc. Escaping from the jail, Sharon and
Foster drive out into the desert, where signs of Rapture multiply, from dust
storms up to the horsemen of the apocalypse running after and around the
car. Next, Sharon and Foster are both “raptured", transported to a purga-
tory-like landscape where Mary approaches them from heaven and pleads
with Sharon to accept god, to declare that she loves god − by just doing this
she will be able to join Mary and Randy in heaven. Foster, although until
now an atheist, quickly seizes the opportunity, says that he loves god and is
allowed entrance to heaven, but Sharon refuses, saying that she cannot
declare her love for a god who acted so cruelly towards her family for no
reason at all. When Mary asks her if she knows for how long she will be
confined to the purgatory, condemned to be there alone, Sharon replies:
“Forever". Sharon’s resistance to God, her refusal to declare her love for him,
is thus an authentic ethical act. It would be totally wrong to say that she
rejects the false god and that, in an authentically Christian version of the
film, the true Christ should appear at the end, proclaim her a true believer
precisely because she refused to declare that she loves the false god. The true
temptation to be resisted is thus to declare our love for a god who doesn’t
deserve it even if he is real. For a vulgar materialist, all this cannot but
appear as an empty mental experiment; however, for a true materialist, it is
only in this way that we really renounce god − by way of renouncing him not
only insofar as he doesn’t really exist, but even if he is real. In short, the true
formula of atheism is not “god doesn’t exist” but “god not only doesn’t exist,
he is also stupid, indifferent, and maybe outright evil” − if we do not destroy
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12 Philosophy After Lacan

the very fiction of god from within, it is easy for this fiction to prolong its
hold over us in the form of disavowal (“I know there is no god, but he is
nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion”). Lacan’s programmatic claim, in
Seminar X, that “the atheist, as combatant, as revolutionary, is not one who
denies God in his function of omnipotence, but one who affirms oneself as
not serving any God”6 fits perfectly this final gesture of the heroine in Rap-
ture: even when she directly confronts the divine dimension, she refuses to
serve him.
The song The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (best known version by
Joan Baez) is a first-person narrative relating the economic and social dis-
tress experienced by the protagonist, a poor white Southerner, during the last
year of the American Civil War; it does not glorify slavery, the Confederacy,
or Robert E. Lee, it rather tells the story of a poor, non-slave-holding
Southerner who tries to make sense of the loss of his brother and his liveli-
hood.7 As such – as an attempt to render the experience of a poor white man
sympathetic to the Southern cause but dismayed at the horror of his suffering
for the interests of the rich slave owners – it is much more effective in dis-
mantling this cause than a direct abolitionist critique, in exactly the same
way as endorsing a religion but then demonstrating how its God is evil/
stupid is much more effective than a direct atheist critique. But does this
mean that this detour through religion is just epistemological, owing to the
limitation of our knowledge, or does it also refer to God himself ? Chiesa
opposes Lacan when the latter allegedly "insinuates" (Chiesa’s strong word)
that “the truth of incompleteness can only be half-said, but the not-One
really is all there is, the problem is simply we cannot say it”:

such a blind reliance on an ultimate ontological not-Oneness supposedly

obfuscated by the finitude of our linguistic-logical condition only rein-
forces weak atheism through the very endeavor to defuse it. If, beyond
the wall of language, and the illusory fabrications of the One it gives rise
to, the not-One is all there is, then this a fortiori requires the deceiving
God, one who is now being specified as not only deceiving us but also,
extra-linguistically, the whole of Creation – as still seen from an intra-
linguistic perspective (Lacan’s).

The basic thrust of Chiesa’s argumentation is accurate: the position he rejects

is the one of naively opposing our perspectives on reality-in-itself to the (not-
One) reality out there, beyond our walls of language. Chiesa correctly points
out that the position of enunciation of such a claim exempts itself from rea-
lity, as if the speaker can elevate itself into the One who can compare reality
with our limited visions of it. This means that the speaker regresses into
general ontology, an all-encompassing vision of reality. However, does the
fact that we don’t have an access to general ontology beyond our historically-
specified transcendental horizons really compel us to leave the possibility
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open that not-One is Not "all there is", that there may be a divine transcen-
dent entity above/beyond it? This is also why I find problematic Chiesa’s
claim that "what science should instead seriously consider as modern physics
is the hypothesis that 'the real is not everything', or better, that the real not-all
is itself not necessarily all there is – although it might well be" − problematic
because, for Lacan, "not-all" means precisely a multiplicity which, since it
cannot be totalised, allows for no exception: "not-all" means that, since it is
never all, there is no exception to it. In other words, Chiesa regresses here to
the commonsense notion of the real "not all" as "not everything there is" – he
regresses to the Kantian notion of a possible unknown In-itself beyond the
sphere of phenomena.
My Hegelian solution is here that there is a crack in reality which makes it
non-totalisable, “not-all", but everything that we project beyond this gap is
our fantasy formation. The only way to avoid agnostic scepticism is to
transpose this gap into reality itself: the gap we are talking about is not the
gap that separates reality-in-itself from our approaches to it but an impossi-
bility which gapes in the heart of reality itself. Let me quote here again the
well-known passage from the “Foreword” to his Phenomenology of Spirit
where Hegel provides the most elementary formula of what does it mean to
conceive Substance also as Subject:

The disparity which exists in consciousness between the I and the sub-
stance which is its object is the distinction between them, the negative in
general. This can be regarded as the defect of both, though it is their
soul, or that which moves them. That is why some of the ancients con-
ceived the void as the principle of motion, for they rightly saw the
moving principle as the negative, though they did not as yet grasp that
the negative is the self. Now, although this negative appears at first as a
disparity between the I and its object, it is just a much a disparity of the
substance with itself. Thus what seems to happen outside of it, to be an
activity directed against it, is really its own doing, and substance shows
itself to be essentially subject.8

We should be very precise here: this in no way implies that there is nothing
beyond the phenomena accessible to us – of course there is an infinity of
entities and processes we haven’t yet discovered, but they are not “transcen -
dent” in the sense of an In-itself beyond the phenomenal sphere. Our claim is
that when we will discover new aspects of reality up to alien lives, we will not
cross the boundary of impossibility that constitutes our reality. We will not
discover God or anything of this order because such figures are a priori,
constitutively, or (as Hegel would have put it) in their very notion, fantasy
formations destined to fill in a gap – as Hegel put it long ago, “behind the
so-called curtain, which is supposed to hide what is inner, there is nothing to
be seen unless we ourselves go behind it".9 So yes, our epistemological
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14 Philosophy After Lacan

uncertainty is irreducible, but whatever awaits us “out there” is NOT any-

thing resembling our figures of “God” – to bring this point to extreme, even
if we’ll eventually encounter something whose features appear to us “divine",
this will NOT be what we call “God".
But does Chiesa’s insistence on agnosticism not rely on his doubt in the
possibility of our full scientific self-objectivisation? Thomas Metzinger10
agrees with him, but he sees this as a limit of our self-experience: we cannot
help experiencing ourselves as “selves", i.e., it is impossible for us to phe-
nomenologically imagine a selfless experience: one can know (in the purely
epistemic sense of objective knowledge) that there is no substantial Self (this
is what Metzinger develops in his PSM theory of subjectivity), but “you
cannot believe in it”:
“The PSM is a theory of which you cannot be convinced, in principle… .
This fact is the true essence and the deepest core of what we actually mean
when speaking about the “puzzle” − or sometimes even about the “mystery”
− of consciousness… . If the current story is true, there is no way in which it
could be intuitively true".11
However, Metzinger goes a step further here: there is one caveat that he
allows, the Buddhist Enlightenment in which the Self directly-experientially
assumes his own non-being, i.e., recognises himself as a “simulated self", a
representational fiction. Such a situation in which the phenomenal dream
becomes lucid to itself “directly corresponds to a classical philosophical
notion, well-developed in Asian philosophy at least 2500 years ago, namely,
the Buddhist conception of ‘enlightenment’”.12 Such an enlightened aware-
ness is no longer self-awareness: it is no longer I who experience myself as
the agent of my thoughts, “my” awareness is the direct awareness of a self-
less system, a self-less knowledge. In short, there effectively is a link, or at
least a kind of asymptotic point of coincidence, between the radical brain-
sciences position and the Buddhist idea of an-atman, of the Self ’s inex-
istence: the Buddhist subjective stance of “anatman” is the only subjective
stance which really assumes the result of cognitivism (no Self), and which (in
certain versions, at least) is fully compatible with radical scientific naturalism.
What should interest us here is the link between purely biochemical pro-
cesses (attacking our brains with so-called “psychedelic” substances) and the
highest spiritual “inner” experience uncannily close to what Lacan desig-
nated as “subjective destitution", the disintegration of the fundamental fan-
tasy which sustains our ego – we can biochemically cause the death of our
ego. People who are doing this are as a rule attacking their depression,
hoping to reinvent themselves completely – or, as Rorick put it: “Ego death
can be really humbling and really important for some people, there’s some
people that need to have their egos killed; but at the same time, it’s a scary
thing to go through". He’s had friends who have experienced ego death and
never returned to drug use – they just needed drugs as a powerful tool for
subjective change.13 It is all too easy to try and distinguish such biochemical
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Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy 15

“death of the ego” with the “authentic” subjective change caused by sym-
bolic work. But there is a limit to this biochemical procedure: it just brus-
quely erases the symbolic network the subject relies upon without “working
through” it and made it implode from within, i.e., without making the sub-
ject confront its antagonisms, its points of impossibility – a nice paradox of
how a direct intervention into the biogenetic Real serves as a way to avoid
confronting the Real immanent to the symbolic order itself.
And this holds even for traumatic events like the Holocaust: any prosaic
description of the horrors of holocaust fails to render its trauma, and this is
why Adorno was wrong with his famous claim that after Auschwitz poetry is
no longer possible: it is prose which is no longer possible, since only poetry
can do the job. Poetry is the inscription of impossibility into a language:
when we cannot say something directly and we nonetheless insist in doing it,
we unavoidably get caught in repetitions, postponements, indirectness, sur-
prising cuts, etc. We should always bear in mind that the "beauty“ of classic
poetry (symmetric rhymes, etc.) comes second, that it is a way to compensate
for the basic failure or impossibility.
Does then the Buddhist meditation, interpreted in Metzinger’s sense,
enable us to evade this basic failure or impossibility? I think it doesn’t – why
not? This brings us back to our topic of mediation and indirectness: Bud-
dhism’s goal is nothing less than to circumvent every form of symbolic
mediation/indirectness and rejoin the pre-symbolic flow of the real. I’ll try to
make this clear by way of a belated reply to my critics. In the last decades,
critiques of my reading of Buddhism abound – even those who are otherwise
sympathetic to my general approach claim that I miss the point when I target
Buddhism. Representative of my critics is “Nagarjuna and ecophilosophy”
by Adrian J. Ivakhiv14 who also relies on John Clark’s “On Being None With
Nature: Nagarjuna and the Ecology of Emptiness”15. Ivakhiv’s starting point
is the core Buddhist concept of “dependent origination”: every identity is
process-relational position, which means that, say, a tree’s existence as a
unitary object, as opposed to a collection of cells, is conventional: “Remov-
ing its properties leaves no core bearer behind". In other words, “the thing we
call a ‘tree’ is, as Buddhists say, empty of inherent self-existence; its essence is
nothing other than the properties and conditions of its self-manifesting".16
This goes against Graham Harman’s (and others’) argument that there is
something more to any object than its properties, relations and conditions.
For Buddhism, there is nothing (no-thing) left over. “But that is not to say
that there is, in fact, nothing… There is the process-relational flux of what
Clark calls “nature naturing", the continual coming into existence and pas-
sing away of the experiential bits of the world, all of which is quite real".17
What this implies is that the “negative” and “deconstructive” project that
Nagarjuna is best known for “goes hand in hand with an affirmative, ‘reality-
based’ project of the sort that, in current continental philosophy, is best
represented by Deleuze” – or, to quote Clark:
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For Buddhism the negative path of the destruction of illusion is inse-

parably linked to the positive path of an open, awakened, and compas-
sionate response to a living, non-objectifiable reality, the ‘nature that is
no nature.’

This brings us to what I see as the central challenge for Buddhism: how do
we, humans, get caught into “a dream world of illusory, deceptively perma-
nent objects and egos, and a futile quest to defend the ego and dominate
reality”? Is it enough to say that this is a “fundamental human predicament",
i.e., a trans-historical invariant? Clark makes here a surprising move into a
Marxist direction:

Where most analyses (including most Buddhist analyses) of egocentric

consciousness and the egoic flight from the trauma of lack stop short is
in failing to investigate the social and historical roots of these phenom-
ena. We must understand that the ego is not only a psychological and
epistemological construct, but also a historical one. Its roots are to be
found in the development of large-scale agrarian society and regimented
labor, the rise of the state and ancient despotism, the emergence of eco-
nomic class and acquisitive values, the triumph of patriarchy and warrior
mentality – in short, in the evolution of the ancient system of social
domination and the domination of nature. To put it in Buddhist terms,
our true karmic burden, both personally and collectively, is our pro-
found historicity and our deep materiality.18

But the question remains: how far can we go in this direction of historicity?
Were individuals in pre-class societies dwelling in a “living, non-objectifiable
reality, the ‘nature that is no nature’”, and should the possible post-capitalist
society also be conceived as a liberation from the “wheel of desire”? Another
question lurks beneath this one: “Why should the destruction of illusion lead
to compassion rather than to cynicism as it often seems to in everyday life, or
to social conservatism as it has in the case of Humean and other forms of
philosophical skepticism?”19 I think that, in spite of all desperate attempts to
demonstrate that the way to Buddhist enlightenment goes through modesty
and compassion, the only honest answer is that of D.T.Suzuki: Zen is a
technique of meditation which is compatible with any political orientation,
liberalism, fascism, Communism…
This brings us back to me and to the Buddhist critique of my work. For
Ivakhiv, this is the point where Buddhism meets psychoanalysis: “The key
difference between Freud/Lacan/Žižek/et al. and Nagarjuna is that the
former presuppose that this /rise of dominating ego/ is unavoidable − the
best we can do is to come to terms with the ego (etc.) process and try not to
get too caught up in the delusional tricks it plays on us".20 This is why my
work totally ignores “the real potential of actually reading Western
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Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy 17

Buddhism not just in light of Lacan, but the teachings of the Buddha and
their lineage".21 This “real potential” is, of course, the affirmation of the flux
of positive life – Ivakhiv introduces it by way of a long quote from D.T.
Suzuki:

D.T. Suzuki, whom Žižek has probably never read22, a trained Zen
Buddhist, as well as professor of Buddhist philosophy and delightfully
fluent writer and speaker of English, echoes Vajjiya when he writes about
Zen as life as ‘absolute affirmation’: ‘we live in affirmation and not in
negation, for life is affirmation itself; and this affirmation must not be
the one accompanied or conditioned by a negation, such an affirmation
is relative and not at all absolute. With such an affirmation life loses its
creative originality and turns into a mechanical process grinding forth
nothing but soulless flesh and bones. To be free, life must be an absolute
affirmation … Zen does not mean a mere escape from intellectual
imprisonment, which sometimes ends in sheer wantonness. There is
something in Zen that frees us from conditions and at the same time
gives us a certain firm foothold … Zen abhors repetition or imitation of
any kind, for it kills. For the same reason, Zen never explains but only
affirms. Life is fact and no explanation is necessary or pertinent. To
explain is to apologise and why should we apologise for living? To live −
is that not enough? Let us then live, let us affirm. Herein lies Zen in all
its purity and in all its nudity as well’.
(An Introduction to Zen Buddhism)23

Ivakhiv’s “Lacanian” reading (supplemented by a critique of Lacan) is

obvious here: far from advocating a renunciation to our desires, Buddha “is
suggesting that staying true to our desire will yield the satisfaction of that
(and all) desire, whereas Lacan is less interested in what it would mean to
satisfy our desire, if it is once we have properly identified it". How can this
be? Ivakhiv introduces here sexual difference: he interprets (what Lacan calls)
the impossibility of the sexual relationship as the impossibility to reach the
goal of the masculine phallic subject which is to swallow/dominate entire
reality; from this phallic standpoint, Buddhism:

appears as a fantasmic spectre in the West, where masculine jouissance is

predominant. Buddhism at once promises and threatens with the Other,
dark, feminine jouissance. Buddhism is only conceivable in what Žižek
might call the Western ideological matrix as this testament to its very
failure to be conceived. Žižek’s critique of Western Buddhism, therefore,
has much less to do with the teachings of the Buddha than he has made
it seem, and significantly more to do with the mystical, feminine jouis-
sance it suggests, which seems to be beyond and for that reason threa-
tening to Žižek.24
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18 Philosophy After Lacan

But is this equation of the Buddhist enlightenment with the assertion of the
mystical feminine jouissance not totally unfounded? Chiesa convincingly
characterises it as "an inverted mysticism“:
"Unlike Eastern polytheisms and their stress on enjoyment, Buddhism is
thus in this sense a religion of desire, but it organises it in a way that is very
different from that of Judeo-Christianity. More precisely, Buddhism short-
circuits 'all the variations of desire' (as poly-desire, we might add), which
appear in it ‚in a most incarnate fashion, ‘with the ‚ultimate apprehension of
the radically illusory character of all desire'”.25
The formula of Buddhism would thus be: not the mystical "one with the
world" (my immersion into the divine One bringing full enjoyment) but the
"none with the world": I identify the void of my (in)existence, the nothing-
ness of my Self, with the void of reality itself which lacks any substantial (id)
entity. While mysticism aims at the subject’s full immersion into the divine
jouissance, Buddhism focuses on desire as the ultimate cause of our suffering:
desire is inconsistent, it cannot ever be fulfilled, fully satisfied, because its
nature is inconsistent – since its object is illusory, the false appearance of a
void, the moment of desire's fulfillment is the moment of its defeat. Bud-
dhism draws the radical consequence from this insight: the only way to avoid
suffering is to step out of (gain a distance towards) the "wheel of desire", to
avoid attachment to any object of desire, which means to accept (not only as
a theoretical statement but also as an existential stance) that desires are illu-
sory because all objects (of desire and in general) are non-substantial fluctu-
ating appearances. Such an existential detachment is the only way for us to
attain peace.
The key question that arises here is, of course: so where does desire come
from? How do we get caught into its illusion? Desire cannot be accounted for
in the terms of the opposition between reified particular objects and the void
beneath them, so that it arises when we get excessively attached to particular
objects. The object-cause of desire (what Lacan calls objet a) is not an
empirical object, it is a virtual element which disturbs the harmonious nat-
ural circuit described and celebrated by my Buddhist critics. So the vision,
advocated by my critics, of a desire purified of its excess, is for Lacan totally
illusory: desire is in itself a “pathological” excess, a de-stabilisation of any
balanced natural order. Suzuki seems to imply that what makes a desire
mortifying is its “intellectualisation”, its submission to rational categories
that reify the fluid life experience of reality into a world of fixed substantial
objects. However, desire is at its most basic not an effect of mechanic intel-
lectual imprisonment, it is a “deviation” inscribed into life itself. In other
words, if we subtract desire from life we don’t get a more balanced life, we
lose life itself. To put it succinctly: Buddhism celebrates the stepping out of
the “wheel of desire", while Lacan celebrates the subject’s very fall into this
“wheel”: “not compromising one’s desire” means a radical subjective
engagement in a crazy desire which throws entire reality out of balance.
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Or, to put it in yet another way, Buddhism accepts the common view that
the purpose of life is happiness (to quote Dalai Lama, “the purpose of our
lives is to be happy"), it just defines this term differently – here are a couple
of statements by Dalai Lama which make this difference clear: “Happiness is
not something readymade. It comes from your own actions". / “When we feel
love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and
cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace". / “We
don’t need more money, we don’t need greater success or fame, we don’t need
the perfect body or even the perfect mate. Right now, at this very moment,
we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve com-
plete happiness". / “Human happiness and human satisfaction most ulti-
mately come from within oneself".26 Following Freud, Lacan, on the
contrary, asserts death drive as the basic component of our libidinal lives
which operate beyond the pleasure-principle: what Lacan calls enjoyment
(jouissance) emerges out of a self-sabotage of pleasure, it is an enjoyment in
displeasure itself.
A Lacanian view is much closer to dr. House who, in one of the episodes
of the series, when he tries to diagnosticise a patient with his group and one
of his collaborators mentions that the patient radiates happiness, immedi-
ately adds "happiness" on a list of the patient’s symptoms of his illness to be
explained and abolished. The feeling of happiness is a dangerous symptom,
not something we should strive for. And one should add here that the same
goes for what is also considered the most spontaneous parental feeling: the
immense love of one’s own small child. Small children are horror embodied:
stupid, annoying, smelling bad, breaking our sleep… so the feeling of love
for them is a clear case of what is called the "Stockholm syndrome": a coping
mechanism to a captive or abusive situation, when people develop positive
feelings toward their captors or abusers over time. Isn’t this the exact
mechanism of how we cope with small children?
So what about the desperate Lacano-Buddhist attempt to read what Bud-
dhism calls nirvana as grounded in what Lacan calls "traversing the fantasy"?
We cannot simply dismiss it as a gross misunderstanding of Lacan because
there is a grain of truth in it: desire is metonymic – every empirical positive
object that we desire is a trap (in the sense that, if we get it, our desire is not
fully satisfied but disappointed, we experience a "ce n'est pas ça" (this is not
that what we really desired), so let’s drop our attachment to particular
objects and just persist surfing along from one object to another. In other
words, a true betrayal of our desire is precisely our full attachment to a par-
ticular object as its true object – if we renounce this, if we maintain a dis-
tance towards every object, we attain peace, we are faithful to our desire, i.e.,
to the void in its heart which cannot be abolished by any object… But this
logic ultimately fails: for Lacan, desire in its "purity" (considered without an
empirical object of desire) cannot be transformed into a peaceful integration
into a non-substantial changing multiplicity of our reality because desire is as
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20 Philosophy After Lacan

such a gesture of breaking up the balance of reality. If we subtract particular

objects, we get the gesture of breaking-up, of disturbing the balance, as such.
What any particular empirical object of desire obfuscates is not the balance
of a void but this negative gesture as such: any particular object particularises
this rupture as such, transforming it into a desire for something that posi-
tively exists as a particular object… But where is here the dimension of
intersubjectivity? In her "Relational Dharma", Jeannine A. Davies deploys a
"liberating model of intersubjectivity" – her starting point is the basic goal of
practicing dharma, which is:

to discern the distinction between conventional and ultimate realities

through direct experience. A simple example of the distinction between
conventional and ultimate reality is the difference between the concept of
water and the physical sensation of water. Its salient characteristics are
of wetness and of a cool, warm, or hot temperature. As awareness dis-
criminates between the concept of water and water’s physical sensations,
an insightful penetration into the nature of conceptual ideation occurs.
Concepts are then seen as abstractions within consciousness, mental
overlays born through prior conditioning.27

Davies, of course, has to concede that the practice of meditation is primarily

focused on solitary, introspective methods, where stages of insight unfold
within a climate of extreme mental seclusion and interpersonal isolation –
her aim is to demonstrate how dharma can also be achieved through new
practice of social interaction. In order to deploy this claim, she has to engage
in the opposition between two main orientations of Buddhism, Mahayana
and Theravada: Theravada concentrates on achieving dharma by means of
individual practice of introspection, while Mahayana emphasises dharma
achieved by social interaction. Say, when an individual is afflicted by a
trauma which threatens to destroy her/his psychic balance and ability to
interact with others, Mahayana practices the Relational Dharma approach,
which:

mediates and attunes within an environment of empathic union, nour-

ishing an atmosphere that assuages anxiety and facilitates the generation
of trust and safety to flow in the in-between. This process allows for the
possibility of transforming negative or life-diminishing 'filters’ into asso-
ciations that widen and deepen identity. In this experience, the appear-
ance of something ‘foreign,’ ‘not part of,’ or ‘too much,’ is relaxed, so
that one’s sense of what constitutes a ‘whole person’ naturally broadens
and evolves, and a deeper understanding of oneself and the relationship
between oneself and others emerges.28
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Lacan's Lesson for Philosophy 21

In such an approach, one achieves “the inner liberty to feel another’s suffer-
ing as inseparable to one’s own and the compassion to seek to alleviate it,
thus respecting the freedom of others as inseparable to one’s own freedom", a
freedom to “forgive others for their transgressions. In order to forgive, the
ability to ‘step back’ and recognise the conditions that gave rise to his or her
actions versus reacting from a place of personalising these actions, must be
developed. As awareness into the causal relationships that led this individual
to be wounded and act in a harmful ways becomes recognised, relational
objectivity emerges and compassion becomes possible".29 Such a stance
opens up a path to peacefully revolutionise our world beset by violence and
non-sustainable action. Our

insight into the conscious engagement of interrelatedness may be one of

the most important in terms of its spiritual, social, and political impli-
cations. It is only when we see with greater clarity the intimate causation
of how 'we,’ citizens of the Whole, affect totality that we find the
inspiration to take personal responsibility for our presence and fine tune
our physiological, emotional, and physical resonance within the Whole.30

Suffering and obstacles to freedom do not simply vanish, they are not simply
left behind; in an almost Hegelian way, they are re-experienced as vehicles for
growth and freedom. They are deprived of their substantial identity and put
in their relational context in which they arise and disappear in co-depen-
dence, resonating within the Whole.
Another difference between Theravada and Mahayana concerns the
accessibility of nirvana which makes the subject a bodhisattva: in Theravada,
encountering somebody who already is a Buddha is needed to truly make
someone a bodhisattva − any other resolution to attain Buddhahood may
easily be forgotten or abandoned during the long time ahead. Theravada thus
held that the bodhisattva path was only for a rare set of individuals and has
to be transmitted through exclusive lineage, in contrast to Mahayanists who
universalised the bodhisattvayana as a path which is open to everyone and is
taught for all beings to follow.
To maintain this universality, the Mahayana tradition has to introduce a
distinction between two different notions of a bodhisattva’s relationship to
nirvana. The basic goal is to become arhat (“the one who is worthy”), a
perfected person, one who has gained insight into the true nature of exis-
tence and has achieved nirvana (spiritual enlightenment): the arhat, having
freed himself from the bonds of desire, will not be reborn. While the state of
an arhat is considered in the Theravada tradition to be the proper goal of a
Buddhist, Mahayana adds to it an even higher level:

a kind of non-dual state in which one is neither limited to samsara nor

nirvana. A being who has reached this kind of nirvana is not restricted
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22 Philosophy After Lacan

from manifesting in the samsaric realms, and yet they remain fully
detached from the defilements found in these realms (and thus they can
help others).31

We thus obtain the distinction between two kinds of nirvan - a: the nirvana-
.
- -
(Buddhism)"nirvan.a of an arhat and a superior type of nirvan.a called apra-
tisthita
.. (non-abiding) that allows a Buddha to remain engaged in the sam-
saric realms without being affected by them. However, the predominant
Mahayana notion of bodhisattva silently concedes that to arrive at such non-
dual state is practically impossible, so he heroically sacrifices his own dharma
and postpones his awakening until all living beings will be liberated − bod-
hisattvas take the following vow: “I shall not enter into final nirvana before
all beings have been liberated", or “I must lead all beings to Liberation. I will
stay here till the end, even for the sake of one living soul".
The bodhisattva who wants to reach Buddhahood for the sake of all
beings, is more loving and compassionate than the sravaka (who only wishes
to end their own suffering): he practices the path for the good of others (par-
-
artha) -
while the sravakas do so for their own good (sv-artha). I find this dis-
- -
tinction between par-artha and sv-artha potentially very dangerous: although
Mahayana appears more “democratic", allowing everyone to attain dharma,
does its notion of bodhisattva who refuses to enter nirvana not conceal a
new form of elitism: a selected few who remain caught into our ordinary
reality (in the wheel of desire), legitimise their special privileged position by
the fact that they could have reached nirvana but postponed it to help all
others to reach it. In some radical sense nirvana thus becomes impossible: if
I reach it, I act as an egotist, caring only for my own good; if I act for the
good of others, I postpone my entry into nirvana… I consider this privileged
position dangerous because it remains caught in a dualism that authentic
Buddhism promises to leave behind: the realm of nirvana becomes a Beyond
which we strive to reach. The danger resides in the fact that this position
relies on what one could call the basic syllogism of self-sacrifice: I want all
living beings to overcome their suffering and achieve the supreme good; to
do this, I have to sacrifice my own happiness and accept suffering – only in
this way my own life has meaning… Again, the danger is that a short-circuit
necessarily occurs here: I automatically take my own suffering as a proof that
I am working for the good of others, so that I can reply to anyone who cri-
ticises me: “Can’t you see my suffering? Who are you to criticize me when I
sacrifice myself for you?” This is why the only authentic nirvana means that I
fully remain in this world and just relate to it differently: “non-abiding” nir-
vana is the ONLY full and true nirvana. So where does even this authentic
nirvana fail?
Buddhism ignores the radical intersubjectivity of desire, the fact that desire
is always reflexive (a desire for desire, a desire for being desired) and that the
primordial lacking object of desire is myself, the enigma of what I am for my
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others. What this means is that, as Hegel clearly saw it, domination of others
and violence towards them is a key moment of the painful process of inter-
subjective recognition. This violence is not an expression of my egotist self-
interest, it relies on an “evil” for which I am ready to put at risk my own
welfare and even my life. Relational dharma is not enough to account for
this “evil” since this dimension of “evil” is constitutive of how I experience
an Other: as an impenetrable abyss which cannot be dissolved in a fluid
network of appearances. At is most basic, “evil” has nothing to do with my
egotist interests: it is more spiritual than simple self-interest − the Buddhist
notion of samsara (“the wheel of desire”) ignores this spiritual aspect of
“evil".
This is where the already-quoted passage about the “key difference
between Freud/Lacan/Žižek/et al. and Nagarjuna” – “the former presuppose
that this /rise of dominating ego/ is unavoidable − the best we can do is to
come to terms with the ego (etc.) process and try not to get too caught up in
the delusional tricks it plays on us”32 – totally misses the point: Buddhism
describes how we can gradually get rid of the egotist stance of domination
over others and of being enslaved to our desires which both cause suffering;
our goal is to reach dharma in which our ego dissolves in the flux of
appearances and loses its substantial identity. Within this space, Freud and
Lacan can only appear as going half-way: they clearly see the self-destructive
nature of the dominating Ego, but they ignore that there is a domain beyond
the ego and its paradoxes, the domain of inner peace and happiness, so their
ultimate reach is to escribe the paradoxes of the ego. For Freud and Lacan,
on the contrary, there is nothing beyond the antagonisms of our reality,
nothing but a gap of impossibility that thwarts it from within: everything
that we perceive as its Beyond we project it there. What this means is not that
what Buddhists describe as nirvana or dharma is an illusion or a fake: it is a
profound experience of subjective destitution, but it nonetheless functions as
the obfuscation of a more radical experience of a gap out of which our rea-
lity appears.
Since dharma is as a rule described as the highest freedom accessible to us,
one should point out that, to anyone who knows a little bit about Hegel, the
radical opposition between the Buddhist and Hegel’s notion of freedom
cannot but strike the eye: for Buddhism, we are truly free when we liberate
ourselves from the rational categories which cut into pieces and thus mortify
the pure non-substantial flux of reality, while for Hegel, the basic form of
freedom is precisely the infinite power of abstraction that pertains to our
Understanding (not Reason), the power to interrupt the smooth flow of rea-
lity and to cut mechanically reality into it species. The very idea that there is
something (the core of the substantial content of the analysed thing) which
eludes Understanding, a trans-rational Beyond out of its reach, is the fun-
damental illusion of Understanding. In other words, all we have to do to get
from Understanding to Reason is to subtract from Understanding its
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24 Philosophy After Lacan

constitutive illusion − Understanding is not too abstract/violent, it is, on the

contrary, as Hegel put it apropos of Kant, too soft towards things, afraid to
locate its violent movement of tearing things apart into things themselves. In
a way, it is epistemology versus ontology: the illusion of Understanding is
that its own analytic power − the power to make “an accident as such − that
what is bound and held by something else and actual only by being con-
nected with it − obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and indepen-
dence on its own account” − is only an “abstraction", something external to
“true reality” which persists out there intact in its inaccessible fullness. In
other words, it is the standard critical view of Understanding and its power
of abstraction (that it is just an impotent intellectual exercise missing the
wealth of reality) which contains the core illusion of Understanding. To put
it in yet another way, the mistake of Understanding is to perceive its own
negative activity (of separating, tearing things apart) only in its negative
aspect, ignoring its “positive” (productive) aspect − Reason is Understanding
itself in its productive aspect.
The common counter-argument is here: but is for Hegel such mortifying
abstraction not just a negative moment followed by a notional mediation by
means of which we return to a higher form of organic unity? Yes, but this
higher organic unity in no way returns to the reality of direct experience: in
it, any reference to direct experience is obliterated, we move entirely within
notional self-mediation. This doesn’t mean that Hegel does not allow for
something that echoes the practice of meditation which (within Theravada
Buddhism) "has primarily focused on solitary, introspective methods, where
stages of insight unfold within a climate of extreme mental seclusion and
interpersonal isolation". However, while, in Buddhism, through such practice
the mind "experiences a kind of current of quiet peace", for Hegel intro-
spection confronts us with an awful space in which ghastly apparitions of
partial objects float around – here is his most famous and often quoted
passage of this "night of the world":

The human being is this night, this empty nothing that contains every-
thing in its simplicity − an unending wealth of many representations,
images, of which none belongs to him − or which are not present. This
night, the interior of nature, that exists here − pure self − in phantas-
magorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a
bloody head − there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here
before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when
one looks human beings in the eye − into a night that becomes awful.33

One should not be blinded by the poetic power of this description, but read it
precisely. The first thing to note is how the objects which freely float around
in this “night of the world” are membra disjecta, partial objects, objects
detached from their organic Whole − is there not a strange echo between this
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passage and Hegel’s description of the negative power of Understanding

which is able to abstract an entity (a process, a property) from its substantial
context and treat it as if it has an existence of its own? “That an accident as
such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only
in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a sepa-
rate freedom − this is the tremendous power of the negative".34 It is thus as
if, in the ghastly scenery of the “night of the world", we encounter something
like the power of Understanding in its natural state, spirit in the guise of a
proto-spirit − this, perhaps, is the most precise definition of horror: when a
higher state of development violently inscribes itself in the lower state, in its
ground/presupposition, where it cannot but appear as a monstrous mess, a
disintegration of order, a terrifying unnatural combination of natural ele-
ments. And Hegel’s ultimate lesson is to learn to “tarry with the negative",
not to dissolve its unbearable tensions into any kind of natural positive flux
of appearances – in short, Hegel’s ultimate lesson is that even the highest
directness of the Absolute is a retroactive product of its mediation.

Notes
1 See Lorenzo Chiesa, “Psychoanalysis and Agnostic Atheism,” in Lorenzo Chiesa
and Adrian Johnston, God Is Undead: Psychoanalysis Between Agnosticism and
Atheism, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2023 (to appear, quoted from
the manuscript). All quotes from Chiesa are from this source.
2 See Adrian Johnston, “Modest Absolute,” in op.cit. All quotes from Johnston are
from this source.
3 Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XV: L’acte psychanalytique, session of
February 21, 1968 (quoted from the manuscript).
4 Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXI (The Non-Dupes Err), the May 21, 1974 session
(quoted from the manuscript).
5 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XXIII: Le sinthome, Paris: Editions du Seuil,
forthcoming, p. 116.
6 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book X: Anxiety, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015,
p. 309.
7 The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down (Wikipedia).
8 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p.
21.
9 PhG English GERMAN (marxists.org).
10 See Thomas Metzinger, Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity,
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003.
11 Ibid., p. 627.
12 Ibid., p. 566.
13 Why more people are seeking out “ego death” via psychedelic drugs | Salon.com.
14 Nagarjuna, ecophilosophy, & the practice of liberation (uvm.edu), and Nagar-
juna, ecophilosophy, pt. 2 (uvm.edu).
15 See “On Being None With Nature: Nagarjuna and the Ecology of Emptiness” |
John Clark (Academia.edu).
16 Ivakhiv, op.cit.
17 Op.cit.
18 Clark, op.cit., p. 28.
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26 Philosophy After Lacan

19 Ivakhiv, op.cit.
20 Op.cit.
21 Žižek’s Western Buddhism (Redux) | And Now For Something Completely Dif-
ferent (wordpress.com).
22 Incidentally, I DID read Suzuki, not only in my youth (when he was a key point
of reference of the hippie movement) but also later, when I learned that, in the
1930s and early 1940s, he fully supported Japanese war against China and elabo-
rated how a Zen training can make individuals much better soldiers.
23 Ivakhiv, op.cit.
24 Op.cit.
25 Chiesa, op.cit. Quotes within the quote are from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book X: Anxiety, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, p. 226.
26 Inspirational Quotes About Happiness From Dalai Lama (Lifehack).
27 Relational Dharma: a Modern Paradigm of Transformation − A Liberating
Model of Intersubjectivity (DocsLib).
28 Op.cit.
29 Op.cit.
30 Op.cit.
31 Bodhisattva (Wikipedia).
32 Ivakhiv, op.cit.
33 G. W. F. Hegel, “Jenaer Realphilosophie,” in Frühe politische Systeme, Frankfurt:
Ullstein, 1974, p. 204; translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s
Recollection, Albany: Suny Press, 1985, pp. 7–8.
34 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 19.
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Chapter 2

My Transference with Lacan as a

Thinker
Sergio Benvenuto

There will be something spurious about what I will say here on the subject of
Lacan and philosophy, because I practice as a psychoanalyst. This means
that, unlike certain philosophers, I think I know how psychoanalytic con-
cepts are constructed and used, I do not take them as ready-to-wear con-
cepts. I am close to the philosophical movement that seeks the sense of
concepts in the way they are produced. The true meaning of a concept is
given by the form of life it expresses (Wittgenstein1).
I confess that I am quite dissatisfied – apart from a few exceptions – with
philosophies that fully take up some of Lacan’s concepts referred to as post-
structuralist or as French Theory. Paradoxically, I find the critical analyses of
both Freud and Lacan by philosophers ranging from Wittgenstein to Der-
rida, from Borch-Jacobsen to Nancy and Roustang, far more interesting. In
short, I prefer to deconstruct Lacan rather than use him as an accomplished
construction. This is because I have long since overcome transference
towards Lacan, and transference – as he said himself – is based on the sujet
supposé savoir [the subject supposed to know]. I do not suppose Lacan’s
knowledge, nor do I suppose Freud’s. I do not take their doctrines to be
revelations. My reading of these authors is laïque, lay, not ecclesiastical; there
are no sacred texts involved.
I smile when I see philosophers taking as gospel every word psycho-
analysts say, as if a clinical practice were enough to conceptualise the
unconscious. It would be like saying that because a couple has given birth to
several children, they have special knowledge about the biology of reproduc-
tion! Theorising a practice is an entirely different thing from the theory that
describes a practice.
Too often we are seduced by the theoretical talent of certain thinkers – and
Lacan’s theoretical talent was remarkable – and believe that they ipso facto
speak the truth. Aristotle’s Physics is one of the most brilliant intellectual
constructions in the history of thought, but today we think that it was rather
the atomists who stated the truth about the structure of nature, even if we
can find Aristotle cleverer than Democritus or Epicurus. The intellectual
seductiveness of a theory does not guarantee its truthfulness. The music of
DOI: 10.4324/9781003425953-3
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28 Philosophy After Lacan

concepts is not actual proof of truth. There is a deviation between truth and
enjoyment.
Though I no longer have a transference towards Lacan, I do find some of
his concepts extremely useful, not only for understanding analytic practice
but also for formulating certain speculative problems acutely.

The Idealist Argument

Much of the ‘Lacanian’ philosophy that flourishes in the sheltered garden of
university campuses leads Lacan back into the tradition of German idealism
and of Marx. A Hegelian-Marxist-Freudian-Lacanian thought, from which I
feel estranged, thrives today. In fact, Lacan was very much influenced by
Kojève’s seminars on Hegel in the 1930s, and his originality consists in
having transferred what I would call the standard idealist argument to
psychoanalysis.
This argument already began with bishop Berkeley, who intended to
exclude matter from a philosophical ontology (and Lacan acknowledged his
debt to Berkeley2). Berkeley said: our only contact with reality is through
perceptions, we can therefore conclude, following Occam’s conceptual econ-
omy of sorts, that reality is the totality of perceptions: esse est percipi.
German idealism took up this argument in a much more sophisticated key:
given that we always understand the world through concepts, we can con-
clude that we can see the world and its history as a dialectical set of concepts,
themselves moments of a single Geist, spirit. This idealist argument is irre-
futable. If someone, such as the Kantian philosopher Krug3 says “how can I
deduce the pen with which I am writing through a historical phenomenology
of spirit?”, the idealist will always have an easy time saying that Krug is
talking about a pen because he already has the concept of a pen, without
which he would not be able recognise that specific pen. And the pen is con-
tingent because he already possesses the concept of contingency. In the end,
everything is resolved in concepts, even pure chance.
Lacan thought of applying the following argument to psychoanalysis:
psychoanalysis is always a logotherapy, i.e., it acts essentially through words.
We can hence conclude that the unconscious itself is logos, discourse. Words
have an impact on the unconscious because it is of the same stuff of which
words are made. But, on the other hand, Lacan knows that the Freudian
unconscious is not made up of concepts, it is something material, which can,
for example, produce somatic effects. For him, therefore, the logos that
counts is not the concepts but the signifiers, that is, the opaque, the material
side of the concepts. The signifier, concretised as the letter, is an ambiguous
entity, a centaur, which has something of the logos and something of thing-
ness. Hence Lacan’s physiognomic slogan: “The unconscious is structured as
a language”. Language replaces the Hegelian Geist.
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My Transference with Lacan as a Thinker 29

Derrida criticised Lacanian theory as logocentric, which is another way of

saying idealistic. Some also pointed out that not everything in language is
structured. It is strongly structured at the two extremes of phonology and
syntax4. In between we have the chaos of the lexicon, which Saussure had
already put on the tab of diachronic linguistics and geographical linguistics.
At the unstructured level of words and sounds, fluid processes operate in
space and time. Two opposite categories dominate current thinking: system
versus flows.
But what Lacan meant to say was: “the unconscious is as structured as a
language is”, hence not everything in language and not everything in the
unconscious is structured. And here the problems begin. Lacan put the
unstructured or weakly structured part of the unconscious on the tab of the
imaginary. For him, the imaginary is the animal, i.e. non-log-ical, part of
subjectivity; it is what properly concerns psychology. For Lacan, psychology
is always animal psychology, even when it deals with humans.
“The unconscious is structured like a language” should therefore be taken
in a weak, philosophical, sense: the unconscious is signification. And it is a
non-analogue signification, it is essentially digital. Yet the logos introduces
the negative and time into the world. How to put this in agreement with
Freud’s ‘analogical’ image of the unconscious, as something without negation
and without time? The logic-isation of the unconscious leads to a reversal of
original Freudianism.
In any case, I reject what most Lacanians ascribe to Lacan: having de-
naturalised our relationship to the body and to the drives. For the simple
reason that I have ceased to believe in the nature versus culture binarism,
which amounts to their opposition. In my view, the distinction/opposition
nature versus nurture is the modernist form of the old metaphysical opposi-
tion of matter versus spirit. In fact, culture is seen as a collectivisation of the
spirit. I think it is time to finally overcome this opposition, and to think of
culture as the non-deterministic unfolding of nature, and a part of nature as
already fully penetrated by negation and time, inventions of the logos.
Today we de facto label as natural anything that resists our plans. If we try
to teach a child mathematics, for example, and he absolutely refuses to learn
it, then we simply give in and say that “the child has a natural learning def-
icit”. But the symptom formed by the unconscious is precisely that which
resists the subject’s project, so in this sense we can consider the Freudian
unconscious part of nature. Unless we completely abandon the nature/nur-
ture opposition.

Towards the real

The fact that the idealist argument is irrefutable does not ipso facto imply
that we must accept it. I personally do not. It is an argument that glorifies
philosophical narcissism to the utmost, as it makes the real world appear
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30 Philosophy After Lacan

entirely homogeneous to the philosopher’s essential medium, which is lan-

guage/thought. Idealism is the seductive professional bias of the philosopher,
like that of a mason is to see the whole world as a construction (see Free-
masonry) or like that of musician is to see the whole world as sound vibra-
tions… Philosophers feel hurt when they have to admit that something is
unthinkable and yet real. Rationalist philosophers assume that all the real is
rational (the principle of sufficient reason, nihil est sine ratione, nothing is
without a reason) and all the rational is real. They perceive an extra-rational
real as the troublesome Gallic village of Asterix, which manages to evade the
domination of the Roman empire. The empire of thought – the acme of
which is philosophical – admits no pockets of resistance. It excludes the
possibility of thinking that something is unthinkable, that we can say that
something is unsayable. But to name the unsayable is not to say it… Just as
being able to say “I shall die” does not at all mean to have defeated our
death.
This does not mean that in rejecting idealism we must ipso facto return to
a naive form of realism, whereby the effort of thought has to be that of
describing the “real relations” between things outside ourselves. Relations are
products of our systems of thought, particularly our languages (in the
plural), and the relations between things are relations that depend on differ-
ent systems of thought.
The real-ism I intend to uphold against idealism is not therefore a return
to positivism, according to which reality is something that language/thought
can describe more and more faithfully. It is not a question of seeing lan-
guage/thought as a more or less faithful mirror of the world (Rorty). The
historiographic reconstruction of scientific thought itself, mainly by the
Austro-American epistemological current (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyer-
abend), shows that knowledge about nature proceeds discontinuously
according to paradigm shifts. That is, the relationship between language/
thought on the one hand and nature on the other is by no means linear or
specular. To put it brutally, the image we have today of scientific knowledge
is not that of a mirror but rather of a biological organism that more or less
manages to survive in a natural environment. Theories fight for survival like
beasts running to arms. Rather than representing, science survives and
reproduces itself, and it helps us survive and reproduce ourselves. It is a
conception of knowledge that I would call bio-pragmatist.
The whole so-called post-structuralist season has been dominated by a
profound historical relativism. In The Order of Things, Foucault5 tried to
show that words are not the mirror of things, but that things are formatted,
as we would say today, by words. Are we then sliding back into idealism? No,
a third way between speculative idealism and positivist realism is possible. To
say that facts are always interpreted as facts does not imply the conclusion
that “there are no facts, only interpretations”, as per the slogan of
Discovering Diverse Content Through
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where “Afric’s sunny,” &c. Innumerable jargons salute your ear as
you move about.
On a bright Saturday morning, a Malay, with a good coach and
four very good horses, drove a party of us out to Constantia, famous
for the making of the celebrated wine of that name. The distance
from town is about nine miles, and the road a very good one. You
pass through long rows of the pine-tree, which I saw planted for
ornamental effect for the first time, and here and there you see the
native silver-tree, its bright leaves glistening prettily in the sun. The
residences on the route are very cosy-looking, and much taste is
displayed in laying off the approaches to them. A house not long
before occupied by Sir Harry Smith, while governor of the colony,
was a very attractive place.
The proprietors of the wine-producing establishments are very
polite in their receptions and show you over their places with
pleasure. We visited their brightly white-washed and steep-thatched
roofed wine-houses, in whose extended walls were seen the huge
wine butts like those of Madeira, but filled with the thicker-bodied
and sweeter Pontac and Frontenac. The wine-house of Mr. Cloete
has on its front quite a well-executed bacchanalian scene in basso-
relievo, and was erected in 1793. The roofs of their houses are steep
and smoothly thatched, which covering is said to last for forty years,
without the accident of fire, of which they are very careful. The
decorations of their grounds are tasty, and the sire, bending outward
the limbs of the oak when young, leaves a canopied place for table
and chairs in the centre of its branches, for the son.
The mode of cultivating the grape for the production of wine at
Constantia is peculiar. They use no arbor for the support of the
vines, but sustain them, a small distance from the ground, with
sticks. When the fruit has reached maturity, the leaves are cut away
to permit its being reached by the rays of the sun, and is only
plucked for pressing when it has become nearly as sweet as a raisin;
hence the taste of the wine, its high value, and its body.
 During our stay at Cape Town, the Kaffir war still continued, and
on our way back from Constantia, we drove to the little settlement of
Wynberg to take a look at the captive Kaffir chief Seyolo, whom the
English had confined in the prison at that place. We found the
prisoner in a small cell, a stalwart woolly-headed negro, not of the
darkest complexion, standing six feet one and three quarters inches
high. His dress consisted of a lit cigar, and a single blanket thrown
round his person. His wife, Niomese, with a good countenance and
very small hands and feet, was with him. In an adjoining cell was his
chief counsellor and his wife. They appeared quite cheerful and
decidedly lazy. When the unintelligent face and elongated heel of
Seyolo, was considered, it was a matter of surprise, how such a
creature could have exercised with any force the power of
command, or displayed any strategic skill to the annoyance of the
English; but it was said that he had not been anything like as
troublesome to the colonists as a withered-legged Kaffir chief named
Sandilli, who having been once taken and turned out on his parole,
would be shot in obedience to the sentence of a drum-head
courtmartial, if again captured. The accounts from the seat of
hostilities, during the time we lay at Cape Town were very
unpropitious, owing to the severe fatigue and exhaustion which the
hale hearty soldiers in their illy-adapted uniform, were compelled to
undergo in bush-fighting or climbing steep places in pursuit of the
alert and fleet-footed Kaffir, while with the best protection that could
be extended to the kraals of the settlers, their cattle were continually
being driven off by the thieving enemy.
A stroll through the botanical garden remunerates one very well.
The exotics are rare and tastefully displayed, while the Fuchias and
the Cape Jasmin laden the air with sweet perfume. The wheat of the
colony is ground in steam-mills situated in the midst of the city.
Having had the good fortune to have such weather as we could
coal ship in, and also employed carpenters to build frames for the
protection of our fire-room hatches, against the water which might
extinguish our fires, should we have the misfortune to undergo one
of the severe gales that are so frequently met with in the ocean
which we had to traverse before reaching our next port, we sent our
letter-bag to a merchant-ship bound to Boston, raised anchor on the
3d of February, and steamed away out, passing the Lion’s Rump,
False Bay, and Cape Hanglip, bound to the Isle of France, or as now
called, the Mauritius. On getting a short distance from the place we
encountered a mountainous, foamless swell, which did not break,
but rolled up to a very great height with regularity. Our ship was
sluggish in the extreme, and when we slid slowly down into the
trough of the sea, the wave before and behind us was apparently as
high as our mizzen top. The colors of a ship hoisted at her mizzen
peak, but only a short way off, at times, were entirely shut in from
our view by the swell. If this sea had only broken it would have
proved the propriety of the old Dutch name for the cape—“the
Stormy cape.” In rounding the cape the fate of the unfortunate
“Birkenhead,” an English transport steamer, lost off it some years
ago by running on a sunken rock, came to mind; and we also
thought of the collected bravery of the large number of troops on
board of her. It is one thing to face death from the belching mouth
of cannon or the deadly rifle, for then a man is hurried on by the
clangor and excitement of the strife, and moves under the illusory
belief that makes more than half the soldiers of the world, that
somebody else may be killed, but that he will not. But what is to be
said in praise of the placid courage of the poor soldiers on the
Birkenhead, who, with death inevitable, not amid “the sulphurous
canopy,” but death from the yawning wave facing them, yet fell into
rank at the roll of drum, as if on a dress-parade, and sank into the
yesty deep with the engulfed vessel, patterns of discipline and
martyrs to duty.
We ran to the eastward for some days for the purpose of getting a
favorable wind and then headed northward for our port. The
weather continued rough and disagreeable. The anti-scorbutic
notions of the commander-in-chief—although we were not a sailing
vessel liable to be out of port for any considerable length of time,
but a steamer whose necessity for coal would require short runs,
caused to be put on board of us before leaving Cape Town, twelve of
the large, wide horned cape-bullocks, and a number of the cape-
sheep with tails as wide as a dinner plate. The stalls of the larger
cattle were on the forecastle and on the quarter-deck, tied up to the
halyard racks. When the ship rolled heavily, the noise of these poor
animals endeavoring to conform to her movement, or disturbed by
the men in getting at the ropes which their large horns covered, and
their continued tramping over the heads of those below deck, was of
course increasing the comfort of shipboard hugely. Then during a
rough night although cleats had been nailed on the deck to steady
them, some steer would tumble down and dislocate his thigh,
requiring the butcher’s axe to despatch him next morning. On the
port side of the “quarter-deck,” y’clepted, I believe, in the time of
Drake, the “king’s walk,” the impromptu bleating of the sheep from a
fold made by lashing oars from the breach of one gun to another,
was quite mellifluous.
If the necessity had arisen of fighting the ship, overboard would
have to go the beef-cattle: if the ship had been required to salute a
superior command met on the sea, the orders would have been
given, perhaps, as follows: “Starboard (look out for the bull) fire!”
“Port (you’ll get kicked) fire!” “Starboard (don’t hurt those sheep)
fire!” &c. The efficiency of the ship for war purposes was seriously
impaired, if not destroyed, during their presence.
Two days from port, the anti-scurvy idea still predominant, punch
made with ship’s whiskey and lime juice, was served out to the crew,
but many an old shell-back as he took his tot, looked as if he would
have preferred the ardent minus the other ingredients.
On the 14th of February we discovered a tant vessel to the
windward of us. It proved to be a steamer under sail alone, her
engines out of gear and dragging her wheels. She stood down in our
direction as if desirous of speaking us, and many expressed much
surprise at our not stopping, but all at once we had stopped, and the
stranger shot across our stern. In answer to the hail, “What ship is
that?” the reply was: “Her majesty’s steamer Styx, bound to the
Mauritius; please report us under sail.” Our stopping was involuntary,
a screw of one of the “cut-offs” to our engines having come out,
which was promptly fixed with a block of wood by one of the
admirable engineers which it was the good fortune of the Mississippi
to have; so that we were ready to go ahead again in a very few
minutes. The Englishman, no doubt, was none the wiser for the
belief that we stopped in courtesy to him.
The weather just before reaching Mauritius was much smoother
than it had been; the sun now came up upon the right, and his
going down in the Indian ocean at night, was a sight most beautiful
to look upon, its whole bosom bathed in fiery floods, and way above,
tower above tower, rose in radiance and glory illuminated clouds.
When our band’s best strains were filling the ship at evening and
these sights preceded night, we could hardly realize that we were in
the Indian ocean—the ocean of squalls, calms, heavy rains, gale,
storm, and hurricane.
 CHAPTER IV.
About 11 o’clock on our fifteenth morning out from the Cape of
Good Hope, the southwestern end of the island of Mauritius was
visible from the masthead, and we put on all our furnaces so as to
reach Port Louis before night. On approaching the land we ran for
two hours, past highly-tilled fields encompassing the cosy houses of
the planters, sloping to the water’s edge in living green. As we
neared the small crescent on which is built the little town of Port
Louis, we were boarded by two English harbor-masters, who
conducted us to our anchorage, and assisted in mooring the ship
head and stern, as the place is too contracted for a vessel of any
size to swing in. Their costume showed the philosophy which John
Bull always carries into torrid temperatures. They were dressed in
white linen roundabouts, pants and shoes, and on their heads were
wide-brimmed hats, made of the pith of a tree and covered with
white. We had gotten the ship secured just about the time a gun
from one of the forts nigh us, announced the hour to be 8 o’clock. I
sat upon the wheel-house looking at the necklace of lights that
marked the town; the moon as if moved by the notes of our band
which was playing delightfully “Katy Darling,” and the “Old Folks at
Home,” seemed to rise more rapidly, and as it came it displayed the
lofty outline of Peter Botte mountain, of Penny Magazine memory;
the tall palms that fringed the beach on the right looked more
stately and graceful in the silver light, and the scene altogether was
so enchanting, that no one who looked upon it, could keep from
feeling Bernardin-St.-Pierreish.
At daylight next morning we got a look at Port Louis. The town is
not extensive, though nestling prettily under tall volcanic hills. Its
suburbs are composed of the red-roofed huts of liberated Africans,
making long streets. In its bazar, like nearly all places in that portion
of the globe, your attention is first arrested by the grotesque—the
kaleidoscope of costume. Of course your ubiquitous pig-tail friend
“John Chinaman” is present. Here he attires himself in dark nankeen
clothes, wears his clumsy shoe without sock, twists his plaited queue
under a Manilla hat, and with his Paul Pry umbrella which he seldom
hoists, looks as much like another “John Chinaman” who passes him,
as two bricks in a house. You see the Arab with his head entirely
shorn, or the dark-haired Lascar most diminutive in loin wardrobe,
but gaudy in the vest that covers his fine-formed chest; the Parsee
clothed in his gown of white muslin, his turban and pointed shoes;
the Malayan women in very brief attire, their children strapped on
their backs, sitting on the wayside, chewing the areca-nut or the
betel-leaf that they may spit blood-red saliva, and none the better
looking for having a large ring fastened through the skin of their
foreheads, or hanging from one nostril. These people are all very
graceful in their movements. Their religions are comprised in
Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Hindoo, &c. They number some six
thousand of the population of the place.
I had a pleasant drive into the country, over fine English roads,
Macadamized with volcanic stone by chain gangs. Our fancy-
turbaned Lascar driver kept up the while a noise like that of our
swamp-sparrows, to encourage his horses. We saw the large fields
of sugar-cane, rustling in their deep green, with here and there the
tall white chimneys of a sugar-house, or the painted roofs of the
chateaus of the Creole, who live very luxuriously, rising in the midst
of the promising crops, whose aggregate yield it was thought would
be one hundred and sixty millions of pounds of sugar. The foliage
that encroaches on the roadside with its luxuriance, or stretches way
back to the base of the steep volcanic hills in sight, says “Tropical,
tropical;” “the acacia waves her yellow hair,” you have the wide-
spreading banyan, the tall rough barked cocoa, the cabbage-tree—
its branches interlocked, the banana, the plantain, the ever-graceful
palm,— each one of its leaves large enough to make a fan; and then
too the traveller’s tree, which on being tapped, affords the weary
and athirst a substitute for water. Underneath this mass of rank
green, you notice the straight-stemmed aloe with its graceful top-
knot, and in the hedges that porcupine plant, the cactus, whose
prickly leaf and long thorn, prevent the hump-backed, or Hindoo
cattle of the country from getting in the fields of green cane. Then
the birds are beautiful to see: the pure white boatswain, the noisy
little paroquet, the black frigate bird, and the pretty little cardinal
with his feather cowl.
The morning scene along the roads is at all times animated. With
his proverbial industry, in rope-harness, one John Chinaman is
pulling and another John Chinaman is pushing, heavy burdens in a
small wagon; or, footing it in a trot to the town, with his bamboo-
baskets strapped on shoulder, goes the chicken-merchant with his
juvenile Shanghaes. Walking past you in groups, their hands clasped
one with another, or stretched on their back, the rays of the sun
kept off by the shady branches of the palm, or sitting under a roof
made of its leaves, having his head shaved, or the hairs of his
moustache plucked out here and there, to make the outline more
graceful, is the semi-denuded and meat-hating Lascar.
This is a very small picture.
I visited the village of “Pamplemouses,” where is situated the
church—as the delightful story, hath it —in which worshipped the
mother of Paul and the mother of Virginia. Not far from this building,
in the grounds of a resident, placed on either side of an artificial lake
containing red and gold fish, are two square cemented pedestals,
surmounted by rude urns, entirely overgrown with the pretty “Pride
of Barbadoes.” These are the tombs of Paul and Virginia—so said the
good old lady who accompanied us to the sentimental spot, and
called our attention to the fact that they were drowned, when these
cocoa, palm, and camphor trees around, were not so large as now.
Mauritius being an English colony, of course we paid a shilling. Some
sentimental Laura Matilda perhaps “in tears and white muslin,” has
striven for affectionate immortality, by writing on the tomb of
Virginia, in a rather masculine hand, her name; and also lets
admiring gazers know, that when she is “to hum,” she is in
Massachusetts.
 Next you have a view of Tomb Bay, where the young unfortunate
went to her death by shipwreck, and after thinking about the height
of the breakers, and the hardness of the coral reef, you soothe the
fervid mood by a stroll through one of the most attractive botanical
gardens that the whole East presents. The sun poured down his
hottest rays, but the lofty and strange trees that meet above your
head, as a Gothic archway, afford shade, and the great moisture
produced under foot, by this exclusion of the sun, brings up a thick
green moss, so you walk on a thick velvet carpet, while on both
sides of you, rivulets of clear water run gurgling all the time.
Whether there was ever such people as the two little loving
recipients of morality, Paul and Virginia, or not, or that the Saint
Giran was ever wrecked, it is a beautiful spot apart from the story.
But there is reality as well as romance in the Isle of France; the
present owner, John Bull, supplies it. On the iron gateway under
which you pass, in landing, is “Victoria Regina,” and Victoria Regina
levies heavy taxes on the planters. A walk on the esplanade shows
you a fence of half-buried cannon—the trophies of the English when
they captured the island from the French. In front of the house of
the governor, who gets ten thousand dollars more salary than our
president, red-coats continually mount guard. Policemen throng the
streets in the same uniform I saw in Canada, and in the barrack is
quartered a fine regiment of fusiliers to keep the people in
subjection.
The island, like others in the Indian ocean, has suffered from
hurricanes; the cane may be most promising in the field, but
destroyed before garnered. The most violent hurricane they ever
had, piled three hundred houses of Port Louis in ruins, and stranded
thirty ships in its harbor.
The Portuguese, the discoverers of the island, called it Cerni; the
Dutch who came afterward, “Mauritius,” after Prince Maurice of
Holland; and the French, Isle of France. In the Champ de Mars, a
fine open plain, where the regimental bands play, the troops drill,
and the pretty Creole women take their evening drives and
promenades, I noticed a very tasteful tomb of a French governor,
Malartie, which was finished by the munificence of Sir William
Gomm, an English governor.
Four days after our arrival, being the anniversary of the birthday
of the Father of our Country, our ship was appropriately dressed with
our national ensign, and at mid-day we fired a salute of twenty-one
guns, in which the English man-of-war, the “Styx,” which had
reached port, would have joined us, but an order from the admiralty
forbids the firing of salutes by their national vessels unless their
battery reaches a certain number of guns.
We reached Mauritius just in time to enjoy its pleasant fruits,
consisting of the pine-apple, the banana, the plantain, the mangoe,
and the alligator pear, which could be plentifully obtained from the
fruit boats that flocked around the ship; and then, too, before
breakfast, we drained the cocoa’s milky bowl.
With a pleasant remembrance of the hospitalities received from
the people of Mauritius, we left Port Louis for Point de Galle, on the
25th of February.
We had a run before us of two thousand five hundred miles, and
expected in the stormy ocean we had to traverse, to meet with
rough weather on the passage, perhaps one of those dreaded
typhoons; and that its approach might be indicated at the earliest
possible moment, our barometer had been compared with the
standard one in the observatory at Mauritius, whose able and
persevering superintendent is devoting himself to the advance of
meteorological information in that quarter of the globe, and the
increase of nautical science, like our own Maury. His name is
Bosquet, and, at the time of our visit, he was preparing a moveable
index card, showing the various quadrants of a revolving gale or
cyclone, which must prove of great benefit to the practical navigator
in those seas. We had a smooth sea during the run, hot weather,
and a light head wind. When General Pierce was taking the oath of
office, on the 4th of March, our nine o’clock lights were
extinguished.
 CHAPTER V.
About nine o’clock of the night of the 10th of March, the lookout in
the top sang out, “Light, ho!” which we knew must be on the island
of Ceylon. The entrance to the harbor of Point de Galle, being quite
narrow, we endeavored to get such soundings as would enable us to
come to anchor until daybreak, but not succeeding in this, the ship’s
head was put off shore, and we lay-to for the night.
That most ancient and quasi-veracious traveller, Sir John
Mandeville, who had great injustice wrought him by the wits of his
day, I think it was, who, in speaking of the approach to Ceylon said,
that the spicy odor therefrom could be smelt long before “the land
thereof might be discerned from the tallest masthead of a ship.” If
this be true, Sir John, great changes have taken place in these latter
days. We did not detect anything unusually odoriferous in the
atmosphere; and I subsequently found that one might walk through
a cinnamon grove without being attracted by the scent, as the
cinnamon proper is hermetically sealed by a kind of epidermis bark,
which has to be removed before it is gotten at. The nutmeg, with
the mace around it, at first of a deep-red color, is enveloped in a
covering as thick as the enclosure of the stone of the apricot, and on
the tree resembles this fruit before ripening. The “spicy breezes”
blow very “softly o’er Ceylon’s isle.”
 CEYLON.

The next morning, having gotten a pilot, we ran into the harbor of
Point de Galle, which is a very contracted one, though quite secure,
surrounded by groves of the tall cocoa-tree, which nearly conceal
the town. The town, built by the Portuguese, is entirely walled in
and fortified; and since its capture by the English its defences have
been increased. It occupies a space equal in extent to Fortress
Monroe, and was garrisoned by a native rifle regiment, with English
officers, and a small number of royal artillery. These Ceylonese
troops are said to show a ferocity of courage when in battle, and the
arms of their light-complexioned commanders frequently have to be
resorted to, to make them cease firing when the order is given. Point
de Galle is now one of the stopping-places for the peninsula and
oriental mail steamers en route to China, and the isthmus of Suez.
There are two other ports on the island: that of Colombo, celebrated
for its pearl-fisheries and white elephants, and that of Trincomalee,
from which a great quantity of the teak-wood is brought.
 We had scarcely anchored when the ship was surrounded by
native canoes, called d’honies, which, at a little distance, resemble
planks edgewise upon the water, fifteen or twenty feet in length.
They are hollowed out of logs so narrow, that the paddling occupant
usually keeps one leg dangling over the side. To prevent their
capsizing, a solid log, much less in size and length, pointed at both
ends, is placed about ten feet off and parallel with the boat. This is
connected with the boat by arched bamboo poles, and forms an out-
rigger. A paddle propels them very easily, and they sail quite fast.
These boats were filled with Indiamen and Ceylonese, who would
have been dressed if they had only had some garment from the slice
of cotton about the loin, up to their neck or down to the heel. In a
short time our decks were filled with them; also Mussulmen and
Arabs, with their small oval caps and vests, exposing breast and
arms, and others wearing kerchiefs of all manner of gaudy colors
wrapped about them and hanging to the knees like a skirt. But the
thing that strikes you with the most singularity is, that the men
whose heads are not shaved, wear their hair in a knot like women,
secured to the back of the head with a large tortoise-shell comb.
These fellows “salam” you, and their salutation is extremely servile.
Some of them come for your clothes—they are washermen, and
return your garments with remarkable quickness for the East. Others
pull out of their kummerbunds at the waist a lot of what they call
precious stones, and say, “Wantshee, me have got good mooney
stones—star stones, ruby, cat’s-eye stone, sapphire,” &c.
“Where every prospect pleases,
And only man is vile!”
The “prospect” of being cheated is not a pleasant one at any time;
and these men are very “vile.” The fellow will hold the precious jewel
to the light, and in the dark, vary its position, rub it, and praise it
with great earnestness and sincerity, but should you be verdant
enough to purchase the gem, even at half the estimate set upon it
by him of the land of Golconda, an ordinary rat-tail file will very soon
assure you that you have got a fine specimen of cut-glass. The
genuine, or precious stones, are bought up by agents and sent to
London. Should their sales grow very slack they are most desirous of
trading for any old clothes you may have—oriental and old clothes!
I landed as soon as I could, after our salute, on the jutty, from
which Mr. Barnum’s elephants had been shipped, and passing
through a walled gate, entered the town, the sun shining down
fiercely. The houses were of a yellow stucco, very low, without glass
in the windows, generally, and their doors concealed behind mat
screens. In my stroll in the direction of a fine new lighthouse,
terminating a picturesque point where the sea continually breaks
sullenly, my attention was attracted by a very long, notched white
flag, with a number of smaller ones on the sides, hanging from a tall
mast. On going toward it, I found it was placed at the entrance of a
walled enclosure, which contained a mosque and Mussulman school.
Fronting the door of the mosque was a pool of not the clearest
water, enclosed in handsome masonry. While I stood there, many of
the devout, among whom I saw a blind man, came in and washed
their hands and face, to say nothing of abluting their dentals,
previous to proceeding to their devotions inside the building; while in
the interior were a number kneeling on mats, then sitting back on
their bare feet, the palms of the hands meanwhile resting on the
knees, occasionally striking their forehead against the tesselated
floor, facing in the direction of Mecca. Their pointed, clog-like
sandals they had left outside. I was told I could enter if I would
remove my pedal covering, but I declined. Removing one’s boots
after a long walk, in a temperature of ninety odd, is not exactly the
thing. I asked, quizzically, a long-bearded old Mussulman standing
by, who understood English, whether he had any idols in his temple.
He replied quickly: “No; there is but one God: we worshipped your
Savior and turned our faces to Jerusalem, until Mahomet our Savior
came—now we turn our faces to Mecca.” Pointing to a Hindoo
temple, he remarked: “They have idols over there, but we are not
allowed even to eat or drink anything when we are near these
buildings.”
 In a low stone edifice adjacent to this mosque I glanced in at a
school, where fifteen or twenty infantile scholars of both sexes
whose wardrobe complete consisted of ankle, waist, and wrist rings,
and pendent little silver ornaments, squatted on mats. In their midst,
a la Turk, sat a shaven-headed, long-bearded Mussulman, chewing
the betel-leaf and areca-nut, and uplifting at intervals the rod of
correction, which was more effective than the ferula of the Christian,
owing to the scanty costume of the juvenile recipients of
Mohammedan morality. The scholars were engaged in writing with
bamboo pens, on boards covered with a clay preparation, passages
from the Koran, which was lying open upon a little stand in front of
the red-saliva pedagogue. When he turned a leaf of his sacred book,
he did it with a portion of his white garment, never touching the
page with the naked hand. It appeared to be a free jabber on the
part of the tender nudes, in Arabic, but if a sentence was missed by
one, down came the Damocletian ratan, and the humanity of
breeches rushed with full force on the mind. The kind heart of Dame
Partington would have been greatly grieved, and she would have
philanthropically exclaimed, “Bless the inventor of clothing.” And
“bless the inventor of clothing;” the vitiated taste that can find
nothing repulsive in an exact marble nudity, which, in the flesh of
the original would be thought with Dogberry, “most tolerable and not
to be endured,” would be most fully satiated—gorged—after
continually looking upon the half-clad and garmentless people of the
East, no matter how fine their figures. He will certainly become of
the opinion that dress is a part and parcel of a woman, and that she
is never so engaging in appearance as when clad in Christian
garments. “Greek slaves” in bronze don’t answer.
One is struck with the fullness, beauty, and glossiness of the hair
of the natives, especially when he bears in mind, that those who do
not shave their heads, walk uncovered under the hot sun of their
clime. I had some curiosity to find out the secret of this. They use
on their hair twice a-week the juice of limes, obtained by boiling
them, and then dress it with an oil pressed cold from the queen
cocoa, scented with “citronella,” a very singular and powerful
perfume which they distil on the island. Sixty drops of the citronella
is sufficient to perfume a bottle of the oil of considerable size.
Should you sleep ashore at the hotel, you are awoke at an early
hour and informed that “bathing” is ready. Accoutred in a Lazarus-
like robe, generally known as a sheet, you bid the heathen lead the
way, and you follow to an outhouse constructed of bamboo and
mats. Here two fellows pour cold water over you from copper
“monkeys,” in such quick succession, that the most inexorable
disciple of Priessnitz, would be soon forced to cry peccavi. Encased
in the Lazarus garment you flee into your chamber. You are pursued
here by a heathen, who tells you “me barber,” and proceeds to shave
one side of the face at a time, shampoos your head with lime-juice,
and then withdraws in favor of another idol-worshipping attendant,
who mollifies you with a cup of fine coffee. The pleasant persecution
over, you sleep again.
The news is conveyed from Point de Galle to Colombo by a
pigeon-express, none of your “fly away to my native land, sweet
dove,” business, with billet-doux, and riband around neck, but
despatches, which are tied to the feet of the bird, who in flying
draws them up under him, and in that way the paper is kept from a
wetting, should it rain. The birds from one point are sent to the
other by a coach, and not being fed in this strange cote, upon being
turned out with their despatch they fly home. They fly seventy-two
miles in an hour and three quarters.
This is an outline of modern Ceylon. The men who “bow down to
wood and stone” here will tell you, that the footprints of a man, in
stone, on the top of a mountain, is the footprint of their God, where
he stepped over to the main land; but it is called Adam’s Peak, and
the Mussulmen say that Adam and Eve dwelt there. They will tell
you that Paradise was in the Seventh Heaven, and that Adam and
Eve were expelled by the command, “Get you down, the one of you
an enemy to the other, and there shall be a dwelling-place for you
on earth.” Adam fell on Ceylon, or Suendib, and Eve at Joddah on
the Red sea, and after two hundred years the angel Gabriel
conducted Adam to where Eve was, and they came and dwelt in
Ceylon.
Before leaving Point de Galle, a green boat came alongside,
bearing an elephant flag, out of which came the captain of a
Siamese man-of-war, to pay a visit of courtesy. He was quite a
young-looking man, dressed in a red jacket with a yellow silk skirt.
Behind him walked an attendant bearing a pearl box in his hand.
One of our midshipmen thought this must contain his “character.” As
he spoke but Siamese, and our commodore did not speak Siamese,
the interview must have been quite satisfactory.
On the 15th of March we left Point de Galle, and headed across
the bay of Bengal, in the direction of the northwest end of Sumatra.
We did not take in our entire quantity of coal at Ceylon, but got on
board fifty tons of the wood of the place, to try the experiment of its
burning in our furnaces. It did not answer; the expense of
consumption per hour was twenty dollars, while coal would have
been about six, and producing less steam, while it induced greater
danger of setting fire to the ship. In our run across the bay of
Bengal we had a smooth sea, hot weather, and moonlight nights. In
five days we were off the island of Nicobar, and entered the straits of
Malacca, the weather changing to squally and rainy. Here we passed
the English oriental mail-steamer from China, having on board
commodore Aulick, whose late command of the East India squadron
was soon to be assumed by the commodore aboard of our ship. Our
run through the straits of Malacca was not signalized by any
remarkable incidents. We saw the shore on either hand at times;
passed in sight of the English East India penal settlement, Pulo-
Penang, and close aboard of some most lovely tropical islands,
anchored at night, and caught some red fish; made lay to, and
frightened half to death, the captain of a Malay boat, called a
parrigue, who had been manœuvring very suspiciously about nine at
night, by firing a couple of muskets at him; and received and
returned a salute. This was the English frigate Cleopatra, in tow of
an East India Company’s steamer, one day’s run from Singapore. As
they neared, the frigate broke stops with an American flag at the
fore, and let slip with twenty-one guns. The old Mississippi was not
to be caught napping, and although we had to lower away our
quarter boats to prevent their injury by the concussion from our
large guns, we soon had flying the English ensign at the fore, and
replied with twenty-one. It is not the greater part of a century, that
an American man-of-war would have been allowed to pass without
any such national courtesy being shown by an Englishman. As the
two vessels passed under our stern and stood on their way, our
band gave them in its best style, “God save the Queen!”
At one o’clock in the day we were boarded by a native pilot, who
brought from the consul at Singapore a letter-bag for us. It was the
first news we had gotten directly, since leaving the United States,
then out eighty days, and almost antipodal to our homes, and no
one but he who has experienced it can appreciate fully the joy of
getting a letter at such a time. It was the first that had come to me
away from my own land, and I could have hallooed.
In the afternoon we rounded in among some beautiful islands,
standing like verdure indexes to the harbor, and soon after anchored
in the English free port of Singapore, about two miles from the
shore.
And first the boats—yes, the boats. There are no more
characteristic things of a people than their water vehicles. The
enormous “Himalaya” steamship is the card that Great Britain sends
out upon the ocean; the magnificent clipper-ships of our own
America, as they ride at anchor in the “gorgeous East,” or the world
over, as impatient steeds to break their tether, not in comparison,
but outstripping by contrast far the naval architecture of any other
people, do not evince the onward and upward march of the United
States, more fully than does the stupid, cumbersome, unsightly junk,
show the inertia of the opinionated Mongolian.
The Malay boats around the ship soon after we arrived, were most
symmetrical in proportion, and pretty to look at. They are “dug-
outs,” rather crank, but beautifully and sharply modelled. The song
of the native rowers is quite strange, and far from unpleasing. The
man who sits behind you in the sharp stern, steering with a paddle,
pitches his voice, and gives the key-note of the “barbaric pearl” ditty
(that is, I supposed, it must have been something about barbaric
pearls), goes on with the burden, and the two rowers amidships,
rather indifferent to the fact that the unsteadiness of their boat does
not suit you, musically chorus, “A—lah! A—lah! El—lel—la!” Their
larger boats called prahus, with their graceful latine sails, move with
great rapidity through the water, and are said to be as elegantly
modelled as any yacht “America.” Indeed, some are of the opinion
that the fast modern pleasure-boat, owes its origin to the prahus of
the Malay.
Thackeray, in his “Cornhill to Cairo,” has most pleasantly and truly
described the keen relish which is afforded to travel if one could be
taken up, and suddenly translated—or immersed as it were—among
a people entirely different in complexion, habit, and costume, from
his own. Unfortunately you are deprived of this in the East; your
arrival at one place is continually anticipating another; and so at
Singapore, most unwillingly, you get too large a slice of the picture,
too much foretaste of the grand “central,” “celestial,” “flowery,”
“middle kingdom,” though in a few days’ run of China. The first thing
that met our gaze, laying in shore of us, their unsightly masts
unshipped, their large sails under cover, their high stems and decks
in the shadow of mats and bamboo, waiting for a change of the
monsoon that they might go back to Quangtung or Fungching, were
moored the ungainly Chinese junks. Of course, as is invariably the
case, even on their smaller boats, from either side of the square bow
peers the big painted eye; and if the stranger should be curious
enough to inquire why they are put there, the matter-of-fact
Chinaman, with a “Hy-yah,”—more expressive than the shoulder
shrug of the Frenchman—would make answer, “No hab eye, how can
see?”
 On landing, the Chinese features of the place are found to
predominate over all others, though the population of the town is
also composed of English merchants, Malays, Arabs, Jews, Parsees,
Hindoos, &c., amounting in all to about forty thousand. You no
sooner put foot on the stairs that lead from the little bridged river,
which equally divides the city, than your ears are filled with the
interminable banging of gongs, more terrific than those which broke
on the tympanum of Mr. Benjamin Bowbell when he was going to be
buried alive with an Eastern princess. If a Chinese funeral is
progressing, the gong is heard, if some mart has just been opened,
or a public sale is to take place, beat the gong, and at sundown from
the junk, “Joss” is “chin-chinn’d” by gong-beating. The streets
present a scene of much bustle and activity, and traversing them are
the most grotesque and picturesque oriental costumes—the large
tassel pendent from the Fez cap of the Parsee, of as bright a scarlet,
or his loose vest of as deep a blue, and the handle of his pipe just as
long, as others that I had seen at prior places.
On the eastern side of the town, fronting on a fine parade or
drive, are the residences principally of the Europeans, with the
exception of some who have their bungaloes near the suburbs. Here
are also situated government-offices, a very plain-looking Protestant
church, whose swinging fans mitigate the intense heat to the
worshipping congregation; a very fine hotel, under whose pleasant
mahogany—located in arbored buildings, kept cool by moving
punkas—we so agreeably placed our knees, to enjoy fine fruits, and
for a time, keep from the rays of a torrid sun; and a pyramidal
column, whose inscription tells in English, Arabic, and Hindostanee,
how grateful the people there resident are for the service rendered
them, while a prominent member of the East India Company’s
government, by one Earl Dalhousie. He may be a scion of Pope’s
“Next comes Dalhousie,” &c.
On the esplanade, when the sun pales his fire in the evening, a
tesselated group composed of the juvenile cockney, the Cingalese,
the Parsee, and, of course, “John Chinaman,” take their evening
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