# Matheme

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The **matheme** (French: *mathème*, from Greek: μάθημα "lesson") is a concept introduced in the work of the 20th century [French](/source/France) [psychoanalyst](/source/Psychoanalyst) [Jacques Lacan](/source/Jacques_Lacan). The term matheme "occurred for the first time in the lecture Lacan delivered on November 4th, 1971 [...] Between 1972 and 1973 he gave several definitions of it, passing from the use of the singular to the use of the plural and back again".[1]

## Characteristics

[David Macey](/source/David_Macey) writes in his introduction to the translation of Lacan's *[The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis](/source/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".[2] They are [formulae](/source/Formula), designed as [symbolic](/source/Symbol) [representations](/source/Knowledge_representation) of his [ideas](/source/Idea) 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 sciences](/source/Hard_science), and as an easy way to hold, remember, and rehearse some of the core ideas of both [Freud](/source/Sigmund_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), "[a](/source/Objet_petit_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 *[Seminar XX](/source/Seminars_of_Jacques_Lacan)*.[3] Composed of two pairs of propositions written in a unique logico-mathematical shorthand inspired by [Gottlob Frege](/source/Gottlob_Frege), one pair was dubbed 'masculine' and the other 'feminine.' These formulae Lacan originally constructed from [Aristotelian logic](/source/Term_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](/source/Alain_Badiou) identifies "matheme" with the scientific procedure.

## Criticism

Though sometimes disparaged as a case of "[physics envy](/source/Physics_envy)" or accused of introducing false rigor into a discipline that is more literary theory than hard science, there is also something of a sense of humor in Lacan's formulas: of one 'sigla which I have introduced in the form of an algorithm', Lacan himself has declared that 'it is created to allow for a hundred and one different readings, a multiplicity that is admissible as long as the spoken remains caught in its algebra'.[4]

[Serge Leclaire](/source/Serge_Leclaire), who is one of the most respected and distinguished of all French analysts, remarked in 1975, for example, that whilst the mathemes might have a certain pedagogic utility, they were basically no more than "[graffiti](/source/Graffiti)"'.[5]

## References

1. Ėlisabeth Roudinesco, *Jacques Lacan* (1997) p. 360

1. [David Macey](/source/David_Macey), "Introduction", Jacques Lacan, *The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis* (1994) p. xxxii

1. Lacan, Jacques (1998). *The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973*. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 78–89. ISBN 978-0393319163.

1. Jacques Lacan, *Écrits: A Selection* (London 1997) p. 313

1. Macey, p. xxxii

## External links

- [Lacanian Matheme Fonts](http://sites.google.com/site/mathemefont/) provided by the [Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis](/source/Australian_Centre_for_Psychoanalysis)
- [Lacan's Sexuation Formulas](https://web.archive.org/web/20120204141006/http://web.missouri.edu/~stonej/formulas.html) by Jack W. Stone.

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