ABSTRACT

In one of the earliest discussions of poststructuralism to appear in English, “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to any Subject Whatever,” Jacques Lacan puts across a notion of structure that would henceforth have significant ramifications on the way identity is theorized across the human sciences. This was during the late 1960s, when structuralism, having been an intellectual trend in Europe for some time, had belatedly crossed the Atlantic and become controversial in select North American academic circles. Lacan, like his younger contemporary Jacques Derrida, was working against the more traditional and widely accepted philosophical assumptions about structure, which tended to see structure as the systematic relation between the part and the whole, with the whole being given priority as a unitary or central governing totality. Unity, Lacan writes, has always been considered “the most important and characteristic trait of structure.” Instead of unitariness, Lacan introduces the possibility of thinking about structure in terms of otherness, which he explains in part by appealing to Frege’s parsing of numbers. In even the most elementary process of counting, he argues, it is always a subsequent number that holds the meaning of the one preceding it:

When you try to read the theories of mathematicians regarding numbers you find the formula “n plus 1” (n + 1) as the basis of all the theories. It is this question of the “one more” that is the key to the genesis of numbers and instead of this unifying unity that constitutes two in the first case I propose that you consider the real numerical genesis of two.