Table Of ContentBeckett, Lacan and
the Mathematical
Writing of the Real
Beckett, Lacan and
the Mathematical
Writing of the Real
Arka Chattopadhyay
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First published in the United States of America 2019
Copyright © Arka Chattopadhyay, 2019
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Cover design: Daniel Benneworth-Gray
Cover image © Caricature of Samuel Beckett, 1969, by Edmund S. Valtman,
U.S. Library of Congress; Sketch of Jacques Lacan, 2007, by Edward Drantler
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To all members of my family present and absent …
Writing is departure …
CONTENTS
List of Figures viii
Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xi
1 Real Writing in Literature and Psychoanalysis 1
2 One … All … Alone: Borromean Logic of Solitude and
Company in How It Is 33
3 Company and the Motility of Real Unconscious 77
4 Jouissance of Worsening in Lituraterre: Worstward Ho 113
5 Mathematized Body and Sexual Rapport 157
Conclusion 191
Works Cited 196
Index of Proper Names 206
Index of Subjects 208
LIST OF FIGURES
1.1 The discourses in rotation from Seminar XVII 22
1.2 Positions in each discourse 23
1.3 Analyst’s discourse 23
1.4 Regular chain 29
1.5 Borromean chain 29
2.1 Borromean knot 54
2.2 Two as junction between one and three from
Seminar XXI 56
2.3 The fourth ring of the sinthome from Seminar XXIII 66
2.4 Positions in discourses 69
2.5 Matheme of the analytic discourse 69
3.1 One way of drawing the quadruple knot from
Seminar XXIII 92
3.2 Schema of alienation from Seminar XI 105
4.1 False hole from Seminar XXIII 118
4.2 True Borromean hole from Seminar XXIII 118
5.1 The central hole of a torus produces the
possibility of holes inside it 166
FOREWORD
Other critics who are cited in this work, such as Ackerley, Brits, Culik
and Stevens, have examined aspects of how Beckett’s works might be
drawn into relation with mathematics. Still others such as Baker, Barfield,
Barker, Brown, Locatelli, Moorjani, Rabaté and Watson have underlined
illuminating parallels between the work of Lacan and Beckett. Yet Arka
Chattopadhyay is the first to offer a sustained reading of the relations and
non-relations between Lacan and Beckett via the bridge of the idea of the
mathematical. Indeed, this is putting it too simply, as the relation is not simply
between Beckett and Lacan using mathematics; rather, these three terms
are interchangeably in relation. That is, the book offers, at the same time,
new readings of Beckett made possible through Chattopadhyay’s careful
attention to the potentials and limits of Lacan’s categories and an acute
understanding of the idea of aporia only possible through mathematical
theory, new readings of Lacan’s categories illuminated by Beckett’s writing
practice, and new understandings of how mathematical theory might be
understood other than as a foundation of rationalism. If Beckett is read
via Lacan, so too Lacan is read via Beckett, and both readings deepen our
understanding of how mathematics, rather than being seen as providing
a precision somehow opposed to the openness and incompleteness that
attends literary logic, might also offer another face, one that helps us come
to terms with the kind of elusiveness that characterizes concepts such as
infinity, the impossible, and via these the Real.
Chattopadhyay underlines that the opposite face to the rationality of
mathematics, the rationality that Adorno and Horkheimer have argued has
imbued Enlightenment thinking, is not the irrational but what Chattopadhyay
calls aporetic logic. This logic of endlessness, of infinities, of sets, of paradox
and of incompleteness is essential to the capacities of mathematical thinking,
and yet we commonly leave it to one side when we loosely imagine what we
mean by mathematics. Just as we leave to one side what it might mean to
exist, to be alive and human, and finite and indeterminate, when we loosely
imagine our own lives. Yet Beckett, Lacan and Chattopadhyay attempt to
imagine our being with rigour, and the kinds of rigour they apply are not
merely figurative; rather, they are precise. Indeed, they offer a mathematical
precision. Chattopadhyay is the first to fully engage with the specificity of
