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91
One
Splits
into
Two
introduced already by Meister Eckhart).
Barbara Cassin, a formidable French
scholar, proposes a French translation
for δέν, which is “ien” – not “rien,” nothing,
but “ien,” precisely “not nothing,” as
Lacan says; 22 or alternatively “iun,” not
one. The English translation by W. I.
Matson proposes the “hing” as opposed
to the thing: “Hing is no more real than
nothing” or “Hing exists no more than
nothing.” 23 So what is this entity, δέν?
Not something, not nothing, not being,
not one, not positively existing, not
absent, not countable – and thus providing
the minimal figure of the two.
This is perhaps the closest that philosophy,
at its dawn, would ever come to
what Lacan, at the other end, would
name “objet a,” the object a, and which
he saw as his crucial contribution to
psychoanalysis, his key theoretical
invention. I can only hint that Lacan
speaks about this at the end of the session
on repetition, where he raises the
question of τύχη and ἀυτόματον, and
he brings together the Aristotelian τύχη
with the δέν of Democritus, this notnothing,
as one of the clues of repetition.
One can simply and rather summarily
say that δέν is also what is at
stake in repetition, an entity which is
being repeated without having a proper
consistency or identity, a cause of the
derailment of causality, but which cannot
be given a separate ontological stature,
an entity inhabiting a crack, not a
positive being but not a nothing.
22 - See Barbara Cassin, “Pour une
sécheresse logique,” in: Yannick
Haenel / François Meyronnis
(ed.), Ligne de risqué, 1997–2005,
Paris 2005, p. 46. Now amply
and magisterially in Alain
Badiou / Barbara Cassin, Il n’y
pas de rapport sexuel, Paris 2010,
pp. 60–94.
23 - W. I. Matson, “Democritus,
Fragment 156,” in: The Classical
Quarterly, 13, 1963, pp. 26–29.
24 - “[Democritus] was no more
materialist than anyone who has
some sense, for instance me or
Marx,” Jacques Lacan, “L’Étour-
dit,” in: Autres écrits, Paris 2001,
p. 494.
25 - He proposes two points of depar -
ture: “‘Naught is more real …’
and the ‘Ubi nihil vales …’, both
already in Murphy and neither
very rational,” Samuel Beckett,
Disjecta, New York 1984, p. 113.
The second one, ubi nihil vales
ibi nihi velis stems from the 17th
century Dutch occasionalist
Arnold Geulincx.
Lacan speaks of clinamen, a deviation,
an inclination, which has already taken
place with Democritus’ invention of
δέν, a clinamen from the grand ontological
tradition which was then being
instituted, a deviation precisely from ἕν
και πᾶν, clinamen from the One. Clinamen
was the word used by Democritus’
follower Epicurus, in a further development,
the deviation of atoms which
stands at the origin of the universe. Let
me just recall in passing that the young
Karl Marx in 1841 dedicated his doctoral
dissertation in philosophy to the
subject of The Di≠erence between the
Philosophy of Nature of Democritus
and Epicurus (Di≠erenz der demokritischen
und epikureischen Naturphilosophie),
where he insisted at
length on the question of clinamen.
This has hardly ever been brought in
conceptual connection with his later
philosophical path, but one could perhaps
see in it something like a parable:
a clinamen, a glitch, which lies at the
beginning of the post-Hegelian era, a
slight inclination, a slip, a departure
from the horizon of the great philosophical
tradition, from a grand narrative
stretching from Parmenides to
Hegel, a δέν opening another era after
the end of philosophy. There is the sort
of history of materialism yet to be
written – from Democritus and Epicurus
to Marx and Lacan 24 , and to Samuel
Beckett.
I will leave the last word to Beckett.
When pressed about the philosophical
interpretation of his work he said in a
letter in 1967: “If I were in the unenviable
position of having to study my
work, my point of departure would be
the ‘Naught is more real …’ 25 So Beckett
himself proposed the Democritus fragment
156 as the clue (one of the two
clues) to his entire work. He used it
already in Murphy (1938), his early
novel, and then again in Malone Dies
(1951), but more emphatically, δέν as
“not nothing” is precisely the “unnullable
least” that Beckett singled out in
one of his last works, Worstward Ho!
(1981). It can be seen as the name of
what is at stake in Beckett’s relentless
endeavor of reduction and perseverance,
and the “unnullable least” is perhaps
a very good name to think the figure
of the two which resists the One
and defies counting.