Out-of-Series / Hors-série

This is a short text intended as part of an introduction for a small publication project which it was not possible to undertake. Nonetheless I think the text stands without that context, and so here it is.

 Out-of-Series / Hors-série

What is this? This Out-of-Series, this Hors-série? On first parse it’s a place for writing towards the work of the School that fall out of the themes and formats that make a common flow of the School. Why that?

The hors of hors-série is a word that comes up occasionally with Jacques Lacan, and Jacques-Alain Miller. For example there’s the hors-sens, the out-of-meaning or out-of-sense. It’s a terms which I can find only once with Lacan in fact, in the Compte rendu du séminaire of …ou pire, in Autres êcrits (p547). Lacan talks of the hors-sens, the out-of-meaning, which is what interested him in the transmission of mathematical knowledge, and which he sought to bring to the transmission of psychoanalysis. Lacan referred there to hors-sens not without reference to the seriality of numbers, and to the invention of a new kind of number outside the set of the series of all integers, pulling in Cantor’s Aleph zero in the out-of-sense of a certain kind of problematising of seriality as such. That is to say that the out-of-meaning of Lacan already implies an out-of-series, and the out-of has the same function in each. I’m reminded of the work Miller did in his unpublished course Le banquet des analystes, specifically around Cantor’s Aleph zero as an invention outside the series of given numbers, a theme taken of course from Lacan. This outside of the series corresponds for Miller (from Lacan) with the objet petit a, as that object which falls out of the set of relations of subject and Other, inside/outside, but also S(A barred), Aleph zero as a way of thinking of the strange kind of signifier that represents the inexistence of the Other — the out-of-series as represented by Aleph zero can be thought in relation to cause, and relates to the position of the end of analysis, and to an analyst’s place in the School. 

Indeed, as Miller proposed in The Turin Theory  — “There is no all of the School. The School is an anti-totalitarian set par excellence, ruled by the function that Éric Laurent recalled yesterday, of the S of the barred big Other. It follows that, paradoxically, the only statement capable of collectivising the School is the one that affirms its being not-all.” 

Both the hors-série and the hors-sens have something to do with the hors-sexe mentioned in Seminar XX — the hors does not refer to a lack of sex, but of a hole in it, in the place of the foundation of sexuality, and so it is with hors-sens and hors-série – the hors, the out-of, is not a lack, but a hole.

From this point of view, we might ask – if a series has an analytic orientation, might it not always already have something hors-série about it? And surely if it is an analytically oriented series, yes. But I think, not without bits and pieces of invention that fall out of, or never did fit, any given series, and at the level of the programme of the School too.

The various series which constitute the working themes and formats of the School constitute necessary quilting points. A quilting point being a thing of meaning, a point developed in Miller’s unpublished course Le lieu et le lien (lesson of 10th January, 2000).  Here Miller developed the theme of the later Lacan as a psychoanalysis out-of-meaning. Miller highlights the difficulty in finding quilting points in the later Lacan — these constructions of points of meaning from which sets and series can organise. Indeed Miller notes that the later Lacan is a development against the totalisation of, and in, psychoanalysis.

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Lacan’s text called L’autre manque, The Other is Missing (Ornicar? 20-21, Eté 1980, p11-12) from his Seminar of January 15th, 1980, regards the then current dissolution of the School. It’s divided up by four asterisms. An asterism is a triangular constellation of three asterisks, and marks a discontinuity in a text. L’autre manque is a presentation against the School as a site of continuity. Lacan is saying it won’t continue. This short text can be taken up not only in the undoing of a School. It says something that can be taken up about the dissolute, the discontinuous, in the School beyond that dissolution. The School carries something of the dissolution within it. It retains an aspect of its members as a ‘pile of people’, an aspect by which ‘nothing allows one to presume that they are all funnelled into a common flow’. The School as de-completed. With asterisms.

Of course we work with quilting points, in the clinic, and in the thematics of the School, but we must also struggle to work with what doesn’t lend itself to the quilting points at hand. Not to be too quick to force a quilting, to understand too quickly. Not to think we can quilt what does not lend itself to quilting. Not to thematise too much in advance of the evidence of our work, or without allowing for that which does not meet the thematic. 

Out-of-Series/hors-série is established from the work of a Cartel of the School as a site to support that work which falls out of, or does not fit, the quilting points and formats of the School. A bet that such a space will support the School in its radical dimension of de-completion.

As such we seek to publish papers of importance to the life of the School, but which are marked each by an asterism from the necessary quilting points of any given moment of the School, finding no other place.