L’Entre d’eux: Lacan, Serres and the climate emergency

ABSTRACT

My article claims that the acceleration of the generalised planetary ecological crisis has been worsened by a form of collective reasoning called disavowal. To understand why and how this mode of reasoning in the Global North is accelerating climate boiling, I turn to Michel Serres’s Le parasite and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. I seek to bridge the gap between Serres and Lacan on the question of language and its connection to human intersubjectivity, and show how their conclusions reveal the mechanisms behind the cognitive dissonance at hand in the climate crisis. I claim that we can connect these two philosophers through the concept of the ‘d’eux’, as it relates to intersubjectivity, and I show how they both deploy and rely on the polyvalence and ambiguity of language as a rhetorical strategy to highlight the presence of a ‘third’, which I claim is the Serresian parasite and Lacanian big Other. This theoretical foundation underlines that one of the key aspects of our linguistic reasoning is to simply accept the imperatives of the parasite or the big Other, and thus enables the argument that our collective psychotic reasoning is, through this evil ‘third’, contributing to the generalised planetary ecological crisis, that we disavow. In the words of Jean Oury: ‘hasard’eux’.

RÉSUMÉ

Mon article se penche sur le rôle d’un type de raisonnement collectif appelé désaveu dans l’accélération de la crise écologique planétaire généralisée. Pour comprendre pourquoi et comment ce mode de raisonnement dans les pays du Nord accélère la catastrophe climatique, je me tourne vers Le parasite de Michel Serres et la psychanalyse de Jacques Lacan. Je cherche à souligner les liens entre Serres et Lacan sur la question du langage et de ses rapports avec l’intersubjectivité, et je montre comment les conclusions de chacun révèlent les mécanismes à l’origine de la dissonance cognitive à l’oeuvre dans la crise climatique. J’affirme que nous pouvons relier ces deux philosophes par le concept du « d’eux », en ce qui concerne l’intersubjectivité, et je montre comment tous deux s’appuient sur la polyvalence et l’ambiguïté du langage comme stratégie rhétorique pour mettre en évidence la présence d’un « troisième », qui, selon moi, correspond au parasite serrésien et au grand Autre lacanien. Ce fondement théorique souligne que l’un des aspects clés de notre raisonnement linguistique consiste à accepter simplement les impératifs du parasite ou du grand Autre, ce qui me permet d’avancer l’argument selon lequel notre raisonnement collectif psychotique contribue, par le biais de ce « tiers » malveillant, à la crise écologique planétaire généralisée que nous désavouons. Pour reprendre les mots de Jean Oury : « hasard’eux ».

The madness of our world

The French expression je sais bien, mais quand même is a convincing shorthand for the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal [Verleugnung].¹ For instance, I know very well [je sais bien], quite soberly and objectively, that our capitalist mode of consumption is ecologically unsustainable; nevertheless [mais quand même], I’ll be flying to Italy this summer. Psychoanalytic concepts can help us understand the contradictions we live with, both in our internal psychic lives and the madness of our world. The man-made climate emergency, or what Martin Crowley has recently called the ‘generalised planetary ecological crisis’ (2022, 1), is a symptom of our collective disavowal. Je sais bien that the world is dying, we might mutter; mais quand même, I simply want what you have; what our parents had! The power of recognising this collective disavowal is the realisation that, even before discussions of any potential solutions to the planetary crisis, we have in the first instance overlooked not only our insatiable appetite for unregulated desire (in other words, our jouissance for the world), but also the very configurations of these desires in the world.²

So, what happens before a more egalitarian, democratised agency can be installed to resolve the planetary crisis? Or, what happens when there is a capture of the individual desires of so-called ‘Earthling alliances’ (Crowley 2022, 255)? What is our usufruct of the world? Which is to say, who gets to enjoy what and where of the world’s resources? As I will show, Michel Serres’s Le parasite is a remarkable intervention in the history of twentieth-century French thought that can help complicate these pressing contemporary questions. In what follows, I first track the impotence of individual action in relation to the climate crisis, to argue that we cannot assuage our climate guilt in this way; individual actions necessarily force us to turn to disavowal to uphold our subjective functioning within such a flawed system. I then show how, for both Lacan and Serres, our subjective problem lies with the structural misfunctioning of our Symbolic systems in the first place, which is to say that the very words we use lead us to a kind of uneasy and imagined, phantasmatic coherence in an incoherent world. I show how, for both Lacan and Serres, in the ‘two’ there is always a ‘third’ [d’eux], and this third is, for both philosophers, the one who governs our actions and elicits our guilt. I conclude, then, by highlighting our impotence within the current techno-capital framework, which has learnt to harness our symbolic failures, further reinforcing our impotence and pushing us into disavowal.

Of course, we really are annihilating the world, and this is neither hyperbole nor metaphor. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently put it in 2023, ‘Human activities […] have unequivocally caused global warming’ (IPCC and Core Writing Team 2023, 6). Moreover, the damage is wide-ranging; for instance, recent empirical studies have found contaminants in farmed salmon are generally higher than in wild salmon (Hites et al. 2004). Another scientific study confirmed that many fruits, vegetables, and grains today carry fewer nutrients than those grown decades ago (Hatfield and Walthall 2015). To add insult to injury, the European Heart Journal evidenced in a 2019 study that air pollution now causes more deaths annually than tobacco (Girard and Vieira 2019). Things are, without a doubt, quite grim. Or at least, more of us are starting to appreciate just how grim things have been for a long while. Each Western generation, though, while blithely continuing to propagate the species under the same unsustainable circumstances, is simply (cowardly even) praying to make it to the end of their singular lives before the true scale of the damage hits. ‘Parasiter veut dire: manger à côté de’, Serres says, ‘l’abus paraît, même avant l’us. […] Celui qui mange à côté de, mange sous peu aux dépens de, mange aussitôt toujours du même, s’installe, et le même donne toujours, jusqu’à l’épuisement, parfois jusqu’à la mort, drogué d’une sorte de fascination’ (1980, 14). Je sais bien that through my daily actions or inactions, ‘manger à côté de’, I am annihilating the world, mais quand même! I hope to die before the worst of it hits, drugged by a sort of disavowed fascination.

Recognising disavowal is a crucial mechanism for demystifying the false-hope arguments of the bloated panglossians, or those who continue to accelerate us towards disaster. Yet, understanding disavowal is also central for those well-meaning accelerationists who seek to incorporate climate anxiety into their disavowal. For example, one way to counter the generalised planetary ecological crisis, these well-meaning accelerationists might suggest, is through perfect, symmetrical information. This mealy-mouthed position runs something like: if we rendered visible the invisible cost of market failures to the planet, economically rational agents will necessarily make ecological choices in the interest of the planet.³ It is for this reason that when I book my flight to Verona, Italy, online, I am confronted with my share of the predicted CO₂ emissions information for my flight: ‘91 kg CO₂ avg. emissions’. Of course, what am I to do about it? Forgo the trip? Yet, the demand that I forgo the trip is not the intended consequence of providing me with this information. Instead, I am not only to feel implicated in the impending planetary disaster, but I need to feel guilty about my particular complicity in it—it is my singular, personal cross to bear. As Lacan explains in L’Éthique de la psychanalyse, ‘le sujet se sent effectivement coupable quand il fait de la culpabilité, de façon recevable ou non pour le directeur de conscience, c’est toujours, à la racine, pour autant qu’il a cédé sur son désir’ (Lacan, 1986, 368). For Lacan, psychic chaos appears on both sides; either I refuse to cede on my desire and contribute to climate breakdown, or cede on my desire and feel the loss of what could have been. As Jean Oury develops in L’Aliénation, this ‘managerialist’ (ophelimitist) mentality has nothing to do with desire proper, but rather a form of ostensible desire that exists only as a necessary by-product of the guilt that is solicited by the managerialists’ desire in the first place, ‘il n’y a qu’à voir les pubs à la télé, ça impose cette idée-là, et ça va même plus loin, parce qu’en plus, si vous n’employez pas cette lessive plutôt qu’une autre, vous êtes coupable, vous n’êtes pas une bonne épouse’ (Oury, 1992, 153). And this is where we can reconnect this argument to disavowal: je sais bien that my flight to Italy will cost the world ‘91 kg CO₂ avg emissions’, mais quand même, I want to live the good life. For Lacan, wishing to live in this way, as a dupe to reigning systems of signification, is paradigmatically what he means by the death drive (Lacan, 1986, 277). Through capital accumulation for others and guilt and passivity for myself, I am a parasite on this planet through my insatiable desire for living, and the disregard for planetary usufruct is my parasitism. And, if you recognised yourself in my description, as you probably should have, so are you.

Un. Nous

For Serres, the ‘parasitisme primaire’ was always agriculture (1980, 224). I recently learned that chickens destined for mass production are, often cruelly, ‘debeaked’ as chicks to prevent cannibalism and in-fighting in their cages as mature chickens. The process of debeaking is inflicted on the helpless chicks, often without anaesthetic. The chickens, then, are expected to live in small cages, barely big enough to stand upright, for the rest of their lives, defecating on each other, and are expected to suffer peacefully—unable to kill themselves or the other. Of course, this is a horrific reality. Any clear-sighted person instantly feels the cruelty of industrial farming and capitalist systems of planetary exploitation. Yet, consumers are duped into being part of such obscene systems through various mechanisms of asymmetric knowledge. Despite applied ignorance to live the good life, we accept to be dupes to these systems of cruelty; we knowingly turn a blind eye, and we disavow the truth. Vegans—however—in attempting to be non-dupes to these capitalist, agricultural systems of exploitation err from our morbid symbolic reality. Indeed, vegans are often treated as mad or bothersome because they fail to accept the symbolic chain that upholds such capricious cruelty. Vegans are sometimes loathed because they merely point out the arbitrariness and deceitfulness of a system that can be otherwise. They really are clear-sighted—we are mad, as it were. Je sais bien that the eggs on my plate were produced by an enslaved debeaked chicken, mais quand même!

A chicken egg, in itself as an object, does not offer us any clues to the cruelty on the other side. However, we are sometimes offered clues concerning the cruelty of agriculture’s primary parasitism. For example, while walking around the Scottish countryside, it is not uncommon to see large industrial dairy farms with hundreds of cows forced to live in close quarters. The smell of raw sewage surrounding these dairy farms can sometimes be too much to bear, a ‘little bit of the real’, as Lacan would have it (SXXIII, 104). Serres says, ‘que donne l’homme à la vache, à l’arbre, ou au bœuf, qui lui donnent le lait, la chaleur, l’habitat, le travail et la viande? Que donne-t-il? La mort’ (1980, 12). Reading this description in Serres’s Le parasite, I was reminded of the opening scenes of Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973), where a cow is butchered on a dirty abattoir floor, afraid and desperate to escape, overlooked by another man puffing on a cigarette with a desensitised look.⁴ But what kind of death do we give these cows exactly? Touki Bouki’s violent and bloody butchering is perhaps not the end for a slaughtered cow, ‘il paraît illogique ou il est scandaleux de jeter de la nourriture’. Serres explains, ‘on le fait cependant. On expulse, on exclut très exactement ce qui est en écart à la nourriture (le terme para-site le dit), son excès ou son excédent’ (1980, 207). Serres’s Le parasite made me feel immensely guilty as I recalled those times when I discarded expired and unopened shop-bought beef that a combination of laziness and poor scheduling did not allow me to prepare. My beef had already been through a process of death and production that once already damaged our lived environment. As I come to throw it away, I recognise the pre-rotting beef is protected by plastic wrapping and, if I’m lucky, will be set alight in a local incinerator and not shipped overseas to, for example, Batam Island, Indonesia, where it is destined to remain abandoned in a shipping container.⁵

Consider the madness of this banal, quotidian scene: my expired cow flesh (sufferance already included) is contained in a sealed, airtight single-use plastic tray inside a black bin liner made of single-use plastic again and destined to be buried somewhere where the cow’s leftover body will be forced to rot inside a vacuum-sealed package where even the parasitic insects, who typically fulfil an essential role in decomposition, will not be able to rectify the problem caused by my parasitic mode of consumption. Despite the knowledge at our disposal, why do we allow ourselves to act in this mad way? Of course, this is not madness at all. This is economic reason, and I am solicited to act in this way. As Serres argues, ‘les fruits se gâtent, le lait tourne à l’aigre, et le vin au vinaigre, ces légumes pourrissent, le stock de blé se remplit de rats et de charançons. Tout fermente, tout se corrompt. Tout change’ (1980, 208). Except, like my cow flesh, some things are forbidden from rotting, at least partially, at least for a period of time, and in my humanitarian hubris, I am a vector to inflict this violence on the world. The plastics of convenience, bottled water, shampoo bottles, and plastic bags, how many will we use today? How long will these take to rot or decompose? Will they ever? For Lacan, this traumatic reality can only be digested via the medium of the fantasy that provides the subject with the appropriate lens to survive a disturbing truth. And it is here that Lacan has a clarity of thought that Serres potentially misses. We imagine, for example, an elaborate, phantasmatic system of recycling, reuse, or procedures in place to resolve the problems we have created, something that might be called: ethical consumption. For example, we might assume that global treaties exist, ratifying the technological mechanisms to stem the madness. But, je sais bien … oui, mais quand même! And instead, we continue to manufacture, trade, and bottle plastic, knowing deep down, as it were, that even in two hundred years, the plastic container will be no closer to rotting.⁶ ‘Nous vivons aujourd’hui l’événement universel annoncé par la fable’, Serres goes on:

Non seulement la fuite de l’homme rustique, mais sa mise à mort. L’agriculture, vieux parasitisme primaire, est éliminé par les parasites de rang supérieur, habitués au bruit, ceux de Mégalopolis. Les rats de ville ont dévoré les rats des champs. Comme les vaches maigres mangent les vaches grasses. Sans deviner, les imbéciles, ce qui arrivera quand auront disparu les rustiques. (1980, 224)

Serres is clear that our ‘superior level’ of parasitism [les parasites de rang supérieur], our reason, already includes the noise of the metropolis and the murder of the ‘rustic man’. In much the same way, for Lacan, we are governed by a form of pre-psychotic subjectivity; it is not only others who are psychotics. We see others as psychotic while maintaining the logic of our madness. As I argued elsewhere, for Lacan, we have been and always will be psychotically organised because our psychic structures are themselves designed to impute psychotic values in us (Richards 2023, 245). Psychotic and parasitic, therefore (SXIX, 208). The psycho-linguistic system itself, call it the Oedipus complex if you wish, is making us crazy. For both Serres and Lacan, something emerges from the psychotic, and it is fundamental. ‘Le nouveau est imprévisible, tout simplement’, Serres says, ‘il est à l’extérieur, avec le fou, le génie, le héros et le saint. Comment est-il possible qu’ils soient là?’ (1980, 227). In a neat reversal, Serres and Lacan seek to reclaim the outside, the madman; the genius; the mystic. The madman is someone who has refused the logic of parasitic relations and so, in many ways, in their madness, stands outside the reason of it all. Yet, we charge that they are mad. What if it was us who were mad? As Serres argues, if we refuse to join in with capital accumulation, production, waste, and parasitic relations, ‘ou [on] meurt, ou [on] devient fou’ (1980, 228).

Capitalism, or ‘capital’ crops up repeatedly in Serres’s Le parasite, and he says that money is the residue of something evil that has rotten away. This something evil had to be transubstantiated, in order to preserve it, to prevent it from rotting away, formalising it, stabilising it, and Serres argues, this is money itself. He says, ‘que l’argent soit de l’ordure n’est en aucune façon un symbole ni un fantasme. Il est exactement le substitut du pourri expulsé, l’équivalent de l’écoulement par corruption’ (1980, 208). Is it surprising, then, that UK and Canadian banknotes have become manufactured from plastic and pig fat? ‘Le substitut du pourri expulsé’.⁷ From a Serresian perspective, we might as well put the unrottable material (plastic) in the place of the symbolic rot (money). This synthetic money goes a step further than Serres suggested in the 1980s, ‘l’argent n’est plus, ou guère plus’, he says, ‘l’or et l’argent. Il tend de plus en plus vers le signe. […] Il s’agit là de la monnaie électronique, signaux échangés entre terminaux d’ordinateurs. Le capital, maintenant, est à la mémoire’ (1980, 229–30). It seems obvious that casting money as symbolic rot is a powerful critique of capital, and in Le parasite Serres asks: what is capitalism if not parasitic destruction? ‘Aux limites du rêve, aux limites de l’univers, le discours composé exclusivement de jokers est l’argent. Quand il n’y a que des jokers, c’est le capital, c’est le compte en banque, c’est l’équivalent général. Ils sont les majorants de ce monde’ (218). But nevertheless, ultimately, for Serres, humans are responsible for the annihilation of our world through capital and over-consumption; indeed he says: ‘le parasite humain est d’un autre ordre par rapport à ce parasite animal: celui-ci est un, celui-là est ensemble, celui-ci est temps, celui-là est histoire, celui-ci est jardin, celui-là est province. Détruire un jardin ou détruire un monde’ (1980, 120). For Serres, humans destroy worlds, not just gardens, and that is, simply, the reason of our world.

However, being human is not easy either for Serres, ‘nos parents ont été exclus du paradis. Tu travailleras, tu accoucheras, tu mourras. Répétitions ou redondances. Le petit d’homme né ou naissant est chassé par sa mère’ (1980, 121). Serres builds a theory of intersubjective relations and intraworld relations that are necessarily mediated by a kind of evil. The evil, though, is very clearly in us. In the system of connected relations that constitute us, we count evil among us. Stressing the biblical fall of man narrative, Serres says: ‘l’exclusion n’est pas un petit malheur. Nous sommes les enfants d’un couple exclu du paradis. Ce paradis perdu est celui du parasitisme’ (1980, 228). Is it any surprise that we, as one human community, cannot enjoy the world’s fruits without overstepping planetary usufruct? ‘Qu’est-ce que le capital? Une ville, une classe, un groupe, une nation. Nous’ (1980, 229, my emphasis). The psychic rationale we employ to enjoy the planetary ransacking in our name is blameless and designed to pacify our guilt-in-the-world: Je sais bien, mais quand même!

Deux: D’eux

With the tiniest flick of a pen, the apostrophe in d’eux in French transforms the number two (deux), which is to say one plus one, into a word which implies ‘at least two’, which is to say probably two or more. Them, then, or d’eux, ‘from them’, or ‘of them’, introduces ambiguity and polyvalence into ‘two’ in French. At the very least, d’eux implies more than one person, a group, and crucially implies an intersubjective relationship. Through the apostrophe, the third is born, and in its most simple and basic structure, in d’eux, we can find the central logic of Lacan’s concept of lalangue. Appreciating lalangue is crucial to understanding the late Lacan’s philosophical project since this difference resembles the many distinctions that Lacan developed throughout his teaching; as evidenced by the distinctions drawn between, for example, the conscious and the unconscious; the symbolic and the real; or knowledge and truth. For Lacan, lalangue is deeply related to homophonies. Why is it that tu es [you are] is also tuer [to kill] someone else? Why is knowledge [or connaissance] always something that is necessarily born and shared between subjects [co-naissance]? Is it a coincidence that subjects need a maître [master] to become themselves, m’être [to be for / to oneself]? For Lacan, homophony highlights the deep connection le langage shares with lalangue since each homophone contains its speculative extra, the Real fiction that creates the Symbolic truth (Lacan, 2023). Subjects can get a sense of lalangue in their maternal language, and Lacan is notoriously tricky to understand because he manipulates the French language for a French audience to illustrate the French ‘bits of’ lalangue. As Julia Kristeva explains in Pulsions du temps, for Lacan, ‘l’être parlant est soumis à l’emprise du code linguistique familial, et chaque langue maternelle s’imprime sur l’organisation du “propre”, y compris du corps propre’ (Kristeva 2018, 160). The bifurcation of the French language at Lacan’s hand resembles a strategy that, according to Lacan, Joyce managed to pursue in the English language: Lacan says ‘Joyce […] a écrit en anglais d’une telle façon que la langue anglaise n’existe plus’ (SXXIII, 11). We could say that manipulating language in this way is Lacan’s means of dissolving le langage and a method of appreciating lalangue for his French auditors. Thinking again about how two implies a third or how deux implies d’eux, and the intersubjective field this inaugurates, consider this quote from Serres’s Le parasite:

Diable ou Bon Dieu? Exclusion, inclusion? Je ne sais. Mais je sais, en tout cas, ces questions archaïques. Les luttes à deux ne sont jamais que de théâtre: apparence, représentation, décor, morale, amusements. Dès que nous sommes deux, déjà nous sommes trois, ou quatre. Nous l’avons appris depuis très longtemps. Le dialogue, pour réussir, demande un tiers exclu, notre logique aussi le requiert. (1980, 77–8)

Both Lacan and Serres make the same argument. Though, for Serres, unlike for Lacan, language is not absolutely everything. Serres says: ‘la raison de langue n’est pas suffisante; une aire sémantique n’est pas un concept, c’est un ensemble flou, je l’ai dit, un espace de jeu, quelquefois pour un jeu de mots’ (1980, 16). However, that does not mean that language is not fundamental for Serres. He says: ‘il y a des taches noires dans la langue’ (26) and ‘nous sommes noyés dans les mots et dans le langage’ (36); which is to say that it is inescapable and opaque, and there is a sense in which the parasite, at least for human relations, is mediated by and in language and speech, as we will see in more detail later. As Serres puts it, ‘la voix est emprisonnée dans une bureaucratie compliquée de lacis, de guichets […] Comme on le disait à l’âge classique, la voyelle est une âme, c’est-à-dire du vent, la consonne est un corps, savoir [sic] une limite et la prison temporaire de l’âme’ (254); which is to say that something modulates and regulates the way we speak, and, in many ways, Serres’s description matches what Lacan means by the big Other in language—the parasite. Serres says:

Les langues articulées sont des souffles parasités. […] L’articulation est un ensemble d’étranglements, les consonnes étranglent les voix. Elles les serrent.

Le parasite faisait la queue, la chaîne. Il est élément quelconque d’une chaîne quelconque. Et maintenant il fait le goutte-à-goutte, la goutte, le flux étranglé. (254)

Similar to Lacan, then, language is always someone else’s speech; it is mediated by someone else’s bureaucracy [emprisonnée dans une bureaucratie], and the strangulations of language are always for someone else. In the same way, for Serres, language is mediated by someone else—the parasite. He says: ‘qu’est-ce qu’un parasite? Un opérateur, une relation. Cette flèche simple intercepte. Elle intercepte les messages organiques en un lieu du système vivant. Bruit, peut-être, langage aussi bien, vivant souvent’ (267). Therefore, like noise, language is a parasite. But why? Because in language, there is ‘them’, the intersubjective ‘at least two’. Parasites cannot live without the host, and noise cannot be heard without the other. Later in Le parasite, Serres mentions the importance of the ‘deux’ again when he writes:

Dès que l’amour fuit, reflue le bruit. […] Dès que nous sommes deux, il y a un milieu entre nous, le rayon s’y perd dans les lames de l’air, le message se perd dans les interceptions, il n’y a qu’espace de transformation. Le tore, la couronne dévorent le système. Il n’est pas besoin de s’en éloigner grandement pour qu’apparaisse le couple fluctuant message-bruit. Peut-être même je n’entends le message que parce que le bruit répand sa rumeur. (94)

Serres’s concept of the joker in language comes particularly close to Lacan’s concept of lalangue. ‘Le joker change’, Serres argues, ‘il est jeton d’échange, il est multivalent, et d’abord bivalent’ (215). He states later that ‘la question n’est jamais tant [de] trouver une clé, ou deux, ou trois, ou n clés, mais de parler une langue qui tienne compte des jokers’ (217). When we use words, language, and speech, we must take into account the jokers, the homophonies, the double, polyvalent and multivalent meanings. For Lacan, the audible speculative extra contained in homophonies signals to the subject that something must exist beyond the confines of language [tu es / tuer], and, according to Lacan, this is not a coincidence. Instead, it is a structural fact of language itself, giving subjects a clue about the Real. For example, when Lacan says the subject is unable to articulate their subjectivity, ‘m’être sujet’ (AÉ, 473), it is because the subject is a prisoner of the desires of the Other—otherwise known as the signifiant Maître. For Lacan, it is no accident that d’eux [them] implies at least deux [two] in French; that nom [name] signals non [no]. It is for this reason that le nom-du-père is such an enigmatic concept; because contained in the nom is the non!-du-père, and contained in the prohibition of the non! is the non-dupes-errent. The example of vegans from earlier can be useful here, since the non-dupes that they are (having refused to be dupes to systems of agricultural exploitation), they refuse the logic of the signifier, and are subsequently considered to have erred into madness through their obstinacy.

In ‘Back and Forth from Letter to Homophony’, Jean-Claude Milner comments on lalangue’s centrality to Lacan’s view of language:

Homophony is not an addition to the various dimensions of language; it is not an ornamental superstructure that does not modify the foundations of the building. On the contrary, it transforms radically everything that can be theorised about the Unconscious and its relationship to the fact of lalangue. (2017, 84–5)

For Milner, recognising the value of homophones is recognising the subject’s radical power in the Symbolic. Indeed, in Écrits, Lacan purposefully discusses the audibility of the Real, and by the audibility of the real (like the importance of sonority in Serres), Lacan partially means homophony. For Lacan, we can never directly access the truth since the truth is only ever half-said or mi-dit (SXXIII, 13) because language itself is an imperfect tool for the truth. The odds are stacked against the subject because there is no straightforward technique for accessing the impossible lalangue. Still, in trying to reach for the impossible, the subject fulfils a necessary aspect of their always already desolate subjectivity.

The subject’s strategy of necessarily reaching for the impossible recurs throughout Lacan’s work. For example, Lacan explains how the subject journeys along the path to subject formation, trying to achieve their ideal ego. However, this process was simply an operation of accepting society’s many parasitic restrictions and discovering how the big Other creates one’s Ego-Ideal. Symbolic injunctions (or the desires of the Other) weigh heavily on subjects as they make their way through the process of identification: symbolic castration; the renunciation of jouissance; accepting the fantasy; and finally, learning to comply with those desires of the Other and becoming a duped host for the parasite. The subject cannot work outside of this symbolic articulation. Lacan, like Serres, describes an asphyxiating social sphere, with Lacan leaving the subject no escape since the subject is necessarily a subject in language, and the Symbolic contains all language. However, where Lacan diverges from Serres is that the speaking being [l’être parlant] is ‘happy’ because, for Lacan, the subject is ignorant about their imprisonment and the reality of their double role as host and parasite. This happiness, of course, is meant ironically for Lacan. The subject is not a subject at all without the necessary deceit of the language they deploy, which imprisons them. For Lacan, the big Other’s deceit is necessary for the subject to survive in the world, and subjects are not supposed to know that they are symbolic prisoners. Like the parasite, the big Other also wants to remain hidden. As Serres argues, the parasite is also necessary, ‘le parasite était inévitable. Je venais du feu, des questions thermodynamiques. Je venais des eaux et des turbulences, des fluences fluides. Le parasite est une inclinaison au trouble, au changement de phase d’un système. Il est un petit trublion. Il était là, nécessaire, sur mon chemin’ (264).

Traumas and anxieties arise, for Lacan, when subjects are exposed to the Real, for example, in recognising the suffering of the chicks that have been debeaked. When confronted with their reality, we wince at the cruelty and feel pangs of empathy, and this is the moment the symbolic starts to falter. However, we must disavow this symbolic fracturing to survive, and we become dupes, we begin to learn how to disavow. Therefore, according to Lacan, from the subject’s perspective, the impossible truth is deeply interlinked with the necessity of knowledge. We are continually forced to confront those bouts de réel in, for example, homophonies. Therefore, the subject is qualified as a continually searching subject, and they become less content as they encounter those bouts de réel in language. An example of a Serresian linguistic bout de réel is the echoing of the sounds in battre (to beat)—/ba/, /batr/. When eating abats (offal), for instance, one is consuming what one cannot name without also hearing the word abattre, which in turn recalls the beaten death of the cow in an abattoir. There is something almost troubling in the way Serres’s text continually echoes these same sounds in its evocation of man’s parasitic relation to the world: he uses variations on abattre, which effectively means to put down but can be used to evoke the felling of a tree and the slaughtering of an animal, while also containing the root battre, which in French is also connected to la battue, the driving of game towards hunters. Serres says:

Nous nous en rapportons à la vache, elle juge. Elle dit: je donne à l’homme lait, enfants, il ne m’a jamais rendu que la mort. Le bœuf, en tiers jugeant nouveau, dit donner son travail et recevoir des coups en récompense, finir ses jours sacrifié sur l’autel des divinités. Tous donnent donc à l’homme, qui ne rend jamais rien. Mais descendons à l’arbre même: il donne le refuge, il donne l’ornement, des fleurs, des fruits et de l’ombrage. En retour, pour salaire ou plutôt pour loyer - car il abrite et fait un territoire - on l’abat. (38, my emphasis.)

Here the verb abattre is postponed to the end of the passage where it designates the felling of a tree; but the reader retrospectively (après coup) understands it as the fate of the cow and castrated bull (bœuf), who speak of their being beaten and slaughtered. Later on, the deadly sound is heard again when Serres uses polyptoton to evoke a hunt: ‘le seigneur chasse-t-il? […] Qui organise la battue? Les valets rabatteurs. Celui qui chasse enfin fait donc tout sans rien faire’ (112). Serres’s Le parasite shows, through its psychotic use of language, how the evil within us necessarily survives and is promoted by everyone. This is also achieved by adopting a historical translinguistry, revealing, through commentary on the Latin etymologies, how different forms of violence are interlinked:

Or l’exigeant ne se contente pas d’agir, il ne se contente pas de l’action. Il va jusqu’à l’exaction. Exigere signifie donc aussi: faire payer. Exactor est le percepteur tout autant que celui qui bannit, exactio est le bannissement et la rentrée d’impôts. Mais nous n’avons pas à l’apprendre; chez nous, aussi bien, les impôts sont exigibles. Il n’est pas inintéressant de comparer cette exigibilité à l’exaction: cette violence par laquelle l’impôt excède ce qui est dû. Comment l’excès se rabat sur la norme.

This passage is remarkably rich; Serres comments on the polysemic nature of Latin roots, while again employing a polyptoton with the words agir/action/exaction; all these linguistic games are characteristic of lalangue, and there is a neat return to rabat, which reveals the violence with which a primordial excess is reincorporated into the norm. There is a sense in which the elaborate system of disavowal that keeps us in a delusional ironic paradise is radically challenged by Serres’s work. In Serres’s translinguistic writings, we can hear and see the contours of evil; Serres unearths those bits of lalangue that show and reinstate the desolation of subjects in the world.

Trois. Le tiers hasard’eux

Serres’s Le parasite is a work on the problem of evil, and Serres repeatedly states this fact, ‘ce livre, on l’a compris, est le livre du mal, le livre du problème du mal’ (120). I believe the overarching social argument in Le parasite is the implicit critique of capitalism. As Serres puts it, ‘la relation d’économie première est d’abus’ (1980, 225). However, it should be noted, he says so without many explicit references to capitalism, most of which come in the third part. Of course, mine is not an original statement, and clearly, for Serres, capitalism is a subordinate concept to the parasitic relation, a parasite on the parasite. Nor is it original to remark that Serres’s writings are parasitic in themselves (in that Serres feeds off others, La Fontaine, Molière, Rousseau, etc.). Yet, it could be fair to say that, for Serres, capitalism is the paradigmatic example of a parasitic value or counter-ethic. Of course, it would be rather banal to try and discuss capitalism as somehow standing outside the nexus of intersubjective relationships, and as Serres says: ‘il n’y a pas de système sans parasite. Cette constante est une loi’ (21). The relationship between the subject and the world, eater and eaten, producer and product is primary, as Serres explains, ‘le parasite parasite les parasites’ (75). Therefore, the guiding force for Serres is that the parasitic rule exists in all of us as a necessary principle in all intersubjective relationships, necessarily preceding the symptom that is capital. He says, ‘le parasite s’est branché aux lieux les plus profitables, à l’intersection des relations’ (61); or again, ‘la relation parasitaire est intersubjective’ (16). Therefore, for Serres, The Parasite is a book about evil and others, the evil in others, and the evil in oneself. ‘Nous sommes bien dans quelque chose de bestial’ as he puts it (18). But for what? What is the point in highlighting this parasitic counter-ethic, the relational, intersubjective concept? Serres remarks that Le parasite is about how we live together, how we relate to one another, and how our collective will is captured by capital. And the key to this entire paradigm of evil is the ‘troisième’. As Serres puts it,

Et le parasitisme est bien fondamental, premier dans l’acquisition de ces nourritures indispensables à l’histoire. Le cheval meurt aux écuries où il traîne son lien, ce lien qui s’est changé de haine en servitude, ce lien qui se réoriente du second, le cerf, au troisième, l’homme. L’homme qui invente de toujours jouer le troisième pour devenir le maître. (87)

This ‘third’ element forces its way into relations and establishes itself as a director in the lives of others. The third develops out of a series. One, two, three. 1. Subject, 2. subjects, 3. Master (maître). There are many parallels here with Lacan since Lacan, too, is interested in this third that he calls the big Other. Serres almost invokes the Lacanian big Other when he says:

Le parasite est toujours là, il est inévitable. Il est en tiers sur le schéma trivial, sur l’étoile à trois branches. Voici la relation inanalysable, j’entends par là qu’il n’en est aucune plus simple. Voici comment commence l’intersubjectivité. Le tiers est toujours là, dieu ou démon, raison, rumeur. Il existe un troisième avant le deuxième. Il existe un tiers avant l’autre. Comme dirait le vieux Zénon, je dois passer par un milieu avant que d’arriver au bout. Il y a toujours un médiat, un milieu, un intermédiaire. (85)

It is, for Serres, therefore, d’eux (from them) before deux. Eux before deux, which is to say ‘them’ before ‘you’ and ‘I’. What could Serres mean by this? Why does he put the d’eux at the beginning of intersubjectivity? Why is the d’eux also related to God, reason and noise? The situation is paradigmatic for Lacan. The big Other exists before the second. In Serres’s words, we could say that for Lacan, the big Other is also where intersubjectivity begins.

For Lacan, the Symbolic is the domain of language for the subject, and subjects enter the Symbolic as soon as they are interpellated by name, which is to say as soon as they are named as infants (or before). For Lacan, subjectivity is not necessarily located in conscious speech, and he contests the idea that the subject is the site of his/her/their subjectivity. Subjects partake in the Symbolic through language, and human beings intersubjectively share the faculty of language. However, it does not necessarily follow that language, or conscious speech, is the location of the subject or subjective insight. The subject can attempt to articulate and describe language’s structure by deploying words, and can utilise language to explain and describe specific symptoms, delusions, or psychotic episodes, yet, fundamentally, language’s first function is to necessarily imply an other, someone else, which is to say that language does not exist without the relationship between subject and other. Language, before signifying something, must signify for someone. This ‘someone’ must be something other than me, and, therefore, ‘du moment que le sujet parle, il y a l’Autre avec un grand A’ (Lacan, 1981, 52).

Lacan’s highly original move suggests that the spoken word of an other inaugurates the big Other, and this big Other, to put it in crude terms, is the stand-in for the Symbolic. Similarly, Serres repeatedly presents the figure of the parasite in its linguistic substance, as dependant on words, which form its particular currency: ‘oui, le parasite la paie de mots’ (1980, 153), or even: ‘il donne des mots contre de la force, oui, de la voix, du vent, contre une substance solide […]. Il capte le rôti et le paie en contes’ (51). Therefore, the big Other is a necessary counterpart to language, and, for Lacan, subjects not only interact with each other but with the big Other first through an implied relation in the currency of language. According to Lacan, it hardly matters if there is an empirical other person to consent to the subject’s use of language or their speech because there always exists the ‘third’, a big Other who hears what we have to say, who consents to our use of language and our speech, thereby reinforcing our obedience to the Symbolic. The situation is similar for Serres, who argues that:

Le parasite est l’être de la relation. Il est nécessaire à la relation, inéluctable par le renversement de la force qui tente de l’exclure. Or cette relation est la non-relation. Le parasite est être et non-être à la fois. (107–8)

The big Other is necessary for the relation, but the relation is a nonrelation par excellence. While there are differences between Lacan’s concept of the big Other and Serres’s concept of the parasite, both are essential for life, death, and intersubjectivity. ‘La relation fait vivre et tue, elle entretient quelqu’un de la survie de l’autre. Le parasite vit de l’hôte, par lui, avec lui, et en lui, per ipsum et cum ipso et in ipso, il a fait de lui sa demeure, sa tente, son tabernacle, il s’y reproduit et pullule, jusqu’à l’inévitable seuil où l’hôte meurt’ (168). As I suggested earlier, are we not all waiting for either our death or the death of the world?

In the Symbolic, the big Other regulates aggressive egos by creating and forming the subject, transforming their ego-ideal into the Ideal-Ego. Therefore, the big Other has a pacifying quality, keeping subjects enslaved and in line. The big Other is judge, jury, and executioner. Since we all give form and content to the big Other, we are ultimately vectors for this parasite, we are hosts, and we are parasites. For Lacan, then, our relationship with the other takes place in our communications with the other, and this communication is predicated on jealousy and rivalry in the imaginary. For Lacan, ‘le moi est ce maître que le sujet trouve dans un autre’, by which he means that the subject is necessarily unstable since the subject’s ego is to be found in the other, who is its master (Lacan, 1981, 107). The ego in the Imaginary realm is fighting two wars, one internally and one with others; the parasite is both host and aggressor. In erotic relations, the other can quash the ego [annuler] and be his/her/their master, and, conversely, the ego is always ready to regain its mastery over the other, and in so doing, the ego could quash the other. Similarly, for Serres, who is quoting Rousseau:

‘Dès l’instant qu’un homme eut besoin du secours d’un autre, dès qu’on s’aperçut qu’il était utile à un seul d’avoir des provisions pour deux, l’égalité disparut, la propriété s’introduisit, le travail devint nécessaire … ’ Qui est donc ce deuxième qui puise dans les provisions du premier, quel est donc ce besoin de secours?. (154)

Both the big Other and the parasite operate to quash, annul, take over, and impose.

For Lacan, since the other is the master of the subject’s ego in the Imaginary, and the other seems to possess all their behavioural traits, instincts, and drives, the other could easily hijack the ego [c’est lui ou moi—it’s him or me]. And how else can we understand Serres when he also says:

Ils sont trois. Le goupil, malin, et le loup, stupide. Ils sont trois, deux idiots et la lune. Qui est le plus fort, qui est le plus sot? […] Autrement. Les deux sujets du même désir sont infiniment éloignés de l’objet. Autrement. L’objet disparaît, illusoire, par clignotement des sujets, ou par leur meurtre réciproque. Autrement. C’est un festin, c’est un banquet interrompu. Autrement. Ce rapport entre les sujets peut être infini. (102–3)

For Serres, like for Lacan, the conditions are ripe for war. However, in the internal conflict between the drives, Lacan argues, the ego must choose which drives and tendencies it should embody and which ones it should discard. To avoid total war, as egos, we do not know why we choose what we choose, there are some drives and tendencies we adopt and some we do not, but regardless of our choices, the ‘synthesis of the I’ is never accomplished. ‘Synthesis’ is not coherent in the Imaginary. The ‘function of mastery’ we adopt is always made with the big Other’s desire, who is both inside and outside the ego. For this reason, any equilibrium reached with another ego is characterised by a fundamental instability (Lacan, 1981, 108). The aggressive tension between egos (or, the dialectic of the unconscious) necessarily precludes any co-existence with the other. Relations between egos in the Imaginary are necessarily unstable as a result, and if left to their own devices, this would result in totally unregulated mayhem. Therefore, something needs to structure the Imaginary. Lacan argues that this void is filled by the big Other, language, and the Symbolic, without which the aggressive relations between egos would lead to a complete collision. And it is from the threat of this complete collision that the Oedipus complex emerges due to the aggressive tensions between egos at the heart of Imaginary relations.

This is why most of us are meat eaters, discard shop-bought beef in plastic wrappers, take aeroplanes to Italy if we can, and why the world is dying. Lacan says our inherited system of signification is unstable; it makes us incoherent since it is incoherent in the first place. What is essential in the Oedipus complex is, not strictly speaking, the desire for incest; the content is a secondary factor. Instead, what is at stake is the prohibition of desire, the rules and expectations of life. Regulation and prohibition create desire itself. Without the Oedipus complex, the aggressive tension between egos would be laced with incestuous drives, leading to further conflict and ruin. Either way, we are headed for conflict and ruin. For humans to have the most ‘normal’ relations, a third needs to intervene, and the third needs to be the model for a successful relationship. For Lacan, this model of harmony must be an injunction enshrined in law, the Law of the Symbolic Order. Lacan insists that the Nom-du-Père is the master signifier in the signifying chain that reigns over the Symbolic. This signifier (Nom-du-Père) is identical to the other signifiers that regulate Symbolic life, for example, the fear of God. These signifiers inaugurate the symbolic law, the structure within which subjects can operate. It plays a vital role in the Oedipus complex since it regulates the subject’s desires.

Serres and Lacan are interested in masters as they direct and guide the subject and how they found a regulative regime or a governing structure. However, there is no actual, identifiable, quantifiable, big Other or parasite in both cases. God exists, but he is absent. I am both an agent of the big Other for others and its first victim. The big Other or parasite is a necessary descriptive concept which enables an understanding in language about the relationship between us intersubjectively and the world. ‘C’est le paradoxe du parasite’ Serres says (107). There is a relationship, it seems to me, between what Lacan means by Maître/m’être and the Maître in Serres’s sense. Serres builds a theory of parasitic relations based loosely on similar ground to Lacan’s mirror stage, where egos vie for survival and overall victory. Serres writes, ‘bref, le parasite n’a qu’un ennemi: celui qui peut le supplanter, en position de parasite’ (145–6), which is paradigmatically the case of egos in the Imaginary. So, the parasite is motivated by failure, mastery, and the loss of power. Serres’s argument in Le parasite is precisely Lacan’s move with the big Other as egos move out of the Imaginary and into the Symbolic. They are both describing the intersubjective evil in us.

Serres seems to totalise the mirror stage into a broader view of the subject in the Symbolic as necessarily mediating their relationship with the world through rivalry and mastery over nature. This is not dissimilar from what Lacan does, too. As Serres explains,

Animaux, végétaux sont toujours ses hôtes, au sens de l’accueil, l’homme est toujours leur invité obligatoire. Toujours prendre, jamais rendre. Il plie en sa faveur la logique de l’échange et du don, lorsqu’il s’agit de toute la nature. Lorsqu’il s’agit de ses semblables, il continue, il voudrait être aussi parasite de l’homme. Son semblable veut l’être aussi. D’où la rivalité. (38, my emphasis)

Position is important for Serres. The position of the parasite is characterised by metamorphosis, it changes and moulds itself into certain objects and relations. Serres clarifies that the parasitic value is present in money, exchange, and gift-giving (198). The parasitic impulse exists in any and all intersubjective relationships, right from the start. He argues that ‘l’argent est Dieu, l’argent est le Diable, il est l’Être et il est le Néant, il est le précieux et l’ordure, il est l’exclu, il est l’inclus, inévitable en tout chemin, et barrant le chemin à toute relation’ (199), and that if you chase it away it always comes back to its proper place, ‘le parasite revient toujours, vous le chassez, le voici qui regagne la place’ (199). Indeed, as I touched on earlier, the power of the parasite is not just economic or implicitly relational, it is, crucially, audible or sonorous. For Serres language is important, but more important is the sonorous quality of noises and sounds. He says,

Ce parasite-là chasse tous les autres. Derrière le pouvoir, derrière la dernière puissance, derrière l’appétit universel, à leur voisinage, à leur bord, la rumeur, le vacarme ensemencent l’espace (223) […]. Mais, en tout cas, tout le monde le sait, celui qui détient le pouvoir est celui qui détient la source et l’émission du son. Qui a la voix forte et haute a toujours raison (186). […] il lui suffit d’intercepter. De dire n’importe quoi, mais d’empêcher de dire. Il suffit de tonner. (187)

Noise is important for both Lacan and Serres, though, as we saw earlier, for Lacan, audibility includes homophony. Lacan purposefully discusses the audibility of the Real and what may or may not lie beyond. The real of lalangue, the power of the third in the two, d’eux. The noise in d’eux tells us something about the third and the parasitic relations underlying language. Serres’s parasite of the mind speaks to us in words and articulated language explicitly designed for us, and as Serres puts it, language is a translation of the same parasitic noise (1980, 266). Indeed, whoever controls the noise controls the madness of the world. Although we might recognise that it is wrong, we are ultimately forced to obey and we are merely deployed as vectors for the big Other’s obscene power to sadistically shout down vegans and climate protestors alike, since ‘il suffit de tonner’. Indeed, the UK government’s latest additions to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 shows this very well: the bill now seeks to control the audible disturbances of protest and contestation, lowering the protestor’s voice, since, they know: ‘qui a la voix forte et haute a toujours raison’ (1980, 186).⁸

‘Nous sommes d’accord, un peu, et nous obéissons, beaucoup’, Serres says, ‘car nous avons peur. Peur du noir’ (1980, 167). So, for Serres, we question little and follow a lot. We silently dump, pillage, kill, and enjoy more than we should. We take notice of the ‘91 kg CO₂ avg. emissions’, disavow, and then fly. Drugged by a sort of disavowed fascination, fearful and desperate to escape, with desensitised eyes, we quietly fly because we hope to die before the worst of it hits. Borrowing from Jean Oury in Onze heures du soir à La Borde, we could say: ‘hasard’eux’ (1980, 371).

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Funding

This work was supported by the British Academy.

Notes

1. For more on the relationship between Verleugnung (disavowal) and je sais bien, mais quand même see Mannoni (1969).

2. For more on the potential for transformative political action see Martin Crowley (2022). For more on the exceptionable obverse, the neo-liberal ‘governance’ through weaponised policing, see Oliver Davis (2019).

3. See EIT Climate-KIC (n.d.).

4. Of course, much could be said about this famous scene and anti-colonial struggle in Senegal. Indeed, for more see Snell (2014).

5. See Phys.org. (n.d.).

6. See McCormick et al. (2019).

7. See Kollewe (2017).

8. ‘This measure has nothing to do with the content of the noise generated by a protest, just the level of the noise’ (HM 2022).