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The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan
A philosophical examination of the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later psychoanalytic theory.
In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom “There is no sexual relationship.” Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism.
Chiesa argues that “There is no sexual relationship” is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real “not-two.” The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility.
Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution.
For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a “para-ontology” yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?
In The Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom “There is no sexual relationship.” Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism.
Chiesa argues that “There is no sexual relationship” is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real “not-two.” The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with the heteros of woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility.
Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution.
For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a “para-ontology” yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?
276 pages, Paperback
First published April 8, 2016
About the author
Lorenzo Chiesa
20 books12 followersLorenzo Chiesa is Director of the Genoa School of Humanities and the author of Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan and The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan, both published by the MIT Press.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 2, 2018
Even though Lorenzo Chiesa's first book is on my list, somehow I ended up reading this one first.
There are obscure writers about Lacan, and there are somewhat less obscure writers about Lacan - Chiesa largely falls in the former camp, based on my reading of this book. Never mind, I have read enough Lacan to handle this difficulty, I think.
Chiesa's thesis is original enough: he aims to look at Seminars 18-20, in which Lacan develops the logical notion of the "not-all." This "not-all" is, more or less, a challenge to totalizing forms of logic or absolutes. The "not-all" is a kind of Lacanian incompleteness theorem, the idea that something always eludes the process of signification.
I rather enjoyed Chiesa's preface, in which he locates the usefulness of this idea in terms of theology. The "not-all" allows us to think toward an atheism that is free of the problems of the "death of God," a new "para-ontology." So far, so good.
It was the middle chapters of the book that I really had difficulty with, not so much because I didn't understand them, but because I revile the language of gender and sexuality that Lacan deploys and Chiesa follows. I think I understand Lacan's theory of sexuation pretty well, on the surface, but it still boggles my mind a) why it has to be framed in terms of gender, when clearly it undermines all standard notions of gender or even sexual preference to the point where these terms are meaningless, and b) what any of this has to do with sex at all.
If we were talking more generally about desire, including but not limited to sex, then I could understand. But why are sex and gender the privileged form? That seems to me an unwarranted blind spot of the whole theory. I like sex, for sure, but if I were honest I would say my neurotic desires are probably far more clustered around, say, food - why isn't that a privileged zone of desire?
The other puzzling thing about Chiesa's book is that he doesn't clarify the logic of what he is doing until you get to the conclusion! That's where he outlines the influence of Frege on Lacan, on how they are using the logic of zero and one to think through similar problems. As such, the "not-two" comes from the fact that zero is counted as a beginning, a starting point, and yet it remains zero, so that if you were to add zero and one together they remain "not-two" even though they are a binary.
If only Chiesa had told me this at the beginning, instead of going on about sexuation and phalluses, everything would have been so much clearer!
I do admire what Chiesa is trying to do in this book. It is bold and ambitious, and charts new territory by exploring the difficult realms of the later Lacanian seminars. But too often it fails to discover a voice and language of its own, and that makes it, by its own logic, rather less than what it sets out to be.
There are obscure writers about Lacan, and there are somewhat less obscure writers about Lacan - Chiesa largely falls in the former camp, based on my reading of this book. Never mind, I have read enough Lacan to handle this difficulty, I think.
Chiesa's thesis is original enough: he aims to look at Seminars 18-20, in which Lacan develops the logical notion of the "not-all." This "not-all" is, more or less, a challenge to totalizing forms of logic or absolutes. The "not-all" is a kind of Lacanian incompleteness theorem, the idea that something always eludes the process of signification.
I rather enjoyed Chiesa's preface, in which he locates the usefulness of this idea in terms of theology. The "not-all" allows us to think toward an atheism that is free of the problems of the "death of God," a new "para-ontology." So far, so good.
It was the middle chapters of the book that I really had difficulty with, not so much because I didn't understand them, but because I revile the language of gender and sexuality that Lacan deploys and Chiesa follows. I think I understand Lacan's theory of sexuation pretty well, on the surface, but it still boggles my mind a) why it has to be framed in terms of gender, when clearly it undermines all standard notions of gender or even sexual preference to the point where these terms are meaningless, and b) what any of this has to do with sex at all.
If we were talking more generally about desire, including but not limited to sex, then I could understand. But why are sex and gender the privileged form? That seems to me an unwarranted blind spot of the whole theory. I like sex, for sure, but if I were honest I would say my neurotic desires are probably far more clustered around, say, food - why isn't that a privileged zone of desire?
The other puzzling thing about Chiesa's book is that he doesn't clarify the logic of what he is doing until you get to the conclusion! That's where he outlines the influence of Frege on Lacan, on how they are using the logic of zero and one to think through similar problems. As such, the "not-two" comes from the fact that zero is counted as a beginning, a starting point, and yet it remains zero, so that if you were to add zero and one together they remain "not-two" even though they are a binary.
If only Chiesa had told me this at the beginning, instead of going on about sexuation and phalluses, everything would have been so much clearer!
I do admire what Chiesa is trying to do in this book. It is bold and ambitious, and charts new territory by exploring the difficult realms of the later Lacanian seminars. But too often it fails to discover a voice and language of its own, and that makes it, by its own logic, rather less than what it sets out to be.
July 9, 2025
Chiesa provides an incredibly clear (if simultaneously theoretically dense) explication of the logic of sexual difference as expounded by Lacan in Seminars XVIII-XX, before teasing out its implications for theology/ontology. We begin with the masculine side as the Don Juan operation of counting women "one by one" (despite also retaining the fantasy of the possibility of totalization), while also demanding a fusion of two-into-One through love, while, for the feminine side, the demand is rather to be taken as "one and only" (though she also reproduces the masculine fantasy in her own relation to her child). We therefore achieve two faces of God, feminine and masculine, not-One and not-Two, and one/One. Out of the indifference of nature comes the in-difference of culture, where the anatomical little difference comes to be read as an asymmetry, in which each is analogized to either the differential function of language (through tumescence/detumescence) or as the signifying gap in the Other (as orifice). This is how Chiesa reads the drive as potential energy, and thus critiques Žižek's Schellingian animism of a pre-subjective God as not-One, which simply reifies into a One by moving towards "something" instead of "nothing," while Johnston is also critiqued for introducing difference into natural indifference in order to account for the emergence of symbolic difference. Chiesa is quite attune to the question of anthropocentrism in Lacan, following him in being careful in not installing the absence of the sexual relation as that which differentiates humans as unique (such as Zupančič does in What Is Sex?), though he also notes the opposite issue, which is that simply assuming that non-human animals are just as dysfunctional as humans would be just as anthropocentric (by projecting human traits onto the non-human world) as declaring their sexuality functional and thus distinct from that of humans (the projection of the key and the keyhole). This makes of this question a rather sticky one, and thus is perhaps why Lacan hesitates rather than providing an unambiguous answer. This is related to another epistemological question, which is that of the fantasy of soul-love, where being is taken as masculine, and the object of its thought as feminine, just as man assumes woman as his soul. As for the human world, the sexual non-rapport can be ciphered through the reality that because gender is always a feigning (imposed on children by adults, who therefore must sexuate themselves on the basis of the opposite sex), woman only relates to man as feign, and vice versa, and thus they never relate directly. Woman is passively taken as an objet a in phantasy, while also actively allowing herself to be counted one by one, through fashioning herself in relation to the (non-existent) universality of women (as one of them). (Conversely, men come to be counted as a totality through each having a woman as a supplement.) And yet, woman also opens out onto Other jouissance, retaining her status as non-All despite being countable (since women do not form a totality, are ultimately uncountable because infinite). I want to relate this to what Chiesa says about the hysteric, who in relation to the Father, attempts to be the whole woman for him, knowing that men are castrated (none are the Father), and thus being uninterested in them. Chiesa claims that all women retain the hysteric position within them despite acceding to the regime of one-by-one counting, and I have to read this in relation to the fact that we remain not-All, of that Other jouissance as a form of protest against the world of castrated men.
December 28, 2023
An amazing work not only outlining the ideas of the sexual non rapport in Lacan but also a great account on the idea of undermining not only metalanguage, but a unified theory of libido which runs the risk of falling into vitalism and idealism. Chiesa finds Lacan of the Lamella to fall into this very same trap that lacan himself tends to criticize in Freud and in science itself. For Chiesa Lacan of the hydroelectric power plant metaphor in seminar 4 is the best example of a materialist definition of libido.
For more info on this, please check out my discussion with Lorenzo Chiesa on my YouTube channel called The Vanishing Mediators.
For more info on this, please check out my discussion with Lorenzo Chiesa on my YouTube channel called The Vanishing Mediators.
April 25, 2021
Zor okunan kitaplardan, çeviri bunu daha da zor hale getirmiş.
January 24, 2022
The first chapter on jouissance is a useful introduction to Seminar XX.
December 21, 2024
You won't find a more thorough analysis of Lacanian ontology anywhere. Buckle up though, it is a ride.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews