Editing Matheme (section)

==Characteristics==

[[David Macey]] writes in his introduction to the translation of Lacan's ''[[The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]]'' that "Lacan saw his "matheme" as something that would ensure the integral transmission of his teachings ... proof against the "noise" or interference inherent in any process of communication".<ref>[[David Macey]], "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'' (1994) p. xxxii</ref> They are [[formula]]e, designed as [[symbol]]ic [[knowledge representation|representations]] of his [[idea]]s and analyses. They were intended to introduce some degree of technical rigour in philosophical and psychological writing, replacing the often hard-to-understand verbal descriptions with formulae resembling those used in the [[hard science]]s, and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]] and Lacan. For example: "$<>a" is the matheme for fantasy in the Lacanian sense, in which "$"  refers to the subject as split into the subject of utterance and uttered subject (hence the matheme is a barred S), "[[Objet petit a|a]]" stands for the object-cause of desire, and "<>" stands for the relationship between the two.

A more complex set of mathemes are Lacan's "formulae of sexuation" which he outlined in the March 13, 1973, session of his ''[[Seminars of Jacques Lacan|Seminar XX]]''.<ref>{{Cite book|title = The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973|last = Lacan|first = Jacques|publisher = W. W. Norton & Company|year = 1998|isbn = 978-0393319163|location = New York|pages = 78–89}}</ref> Composed of two pairs of propositions written in a unique logico-mathematical shorthand inspired by [[Gottlob Frege]], one pair was dubbed 'masculine' and the other 'feminine.' These formulae Lacan originally constructed from [[Term logic|Aristotelian logic]] over the course of an entire year of study. The "matheme", for Lacan, is not simply the imitation of science by philosophy, but the ideal of a perfect means for the integral transmission of knowledge. Natural language, with its constant "metonymic slide", fails here, where mathematics succeeds. Contemporary philosopher [[Alain Badiou]] identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.