Lacan asserted that “belief [foi] is the deepest mode of the relationship of man to reality,” that is, explains Jacques-Alain Miller, “to the signifier.”[1] This fundamental yes, this Bejahung, is essential for psychoanalysis to exist, says Miller, but also for our relationship to science as such. What it takes for scientific thought to exist is consent to a certain blindness: “to invent the law of falling bodies, one must begin by rejecting all empirical evidence. You really must close your eyes and calculate.”[2] It sounds odd, but science, as well as psychoanalysis, is on the side of belief. On the contrary, conspiratorialism is on the side of unbelief, which is not the same as doubt; the conspiracist does not doubt, his is certainty.
Belief and doubt are on the same side, as every sincere believer well knows. In Seminar XI, Lacan states that “there is no belief that is full and entire” since the division of the subject is fundamental in every belief.[3] Doubt is Cartesian, but so is belief. Descartes believed in a non-deceiving God. Ours is the belief in the non-deceit of mathematical demonstration[4] and natural science. Belief in the Other of science goes first, then comes our self and that which we are able to know. We are humble like the lilies of the field, we do not place the cause in our self. What goes first is our belief in the Other, our love for the Other, that is, transference. Dominique Laurent points out that the neurotic is a believer, “the neurotic believes in his symptom, that is, he thinks that he has a signification that escapes him, and he tries to decipher it alongside another, the psychoanalyst situated as subject supposed to know.”[5]
This is the exact opposite of what happens in paranoia. Lacan explains that in paranoia there is a taking of the signifying chain that is solid and en masse, that forbids “the dialectical opening that is manifested in the phenomenon of belief.”[6] Miller explains that in paranoia and, also, in erotomania, which is a form of paranoia, we have an “inverted transference”. The subject departs from “I know”, not “I don’t know.” This is the case of love following knowledge: “there is indeed there, if I may say so, an epistemomania [epistemomanie].”[7] I believe that we can place conspirationalism on the same side as epistemomania. This is the side of meaning.
Miller reminds us that “psychoanalysis began with hysteria framed by the search for the cause, by the search for the objective cause. It is indeed this departure from the natural sciences which sets Freud apart and which, paradoxically, puts him in a position to hear what the hysterics say to him.”[8] But to do so, Freud “rejects, and will reject throughout his work, any idea of hermeneutics.”[9] For Freud, says Miller, meaning was the opposite of science and the evidence of meaning, the evidence of the senses, “obstructs and prohibits the scientific research of the cause.”[10]
Thus, Miller draws a line between what he calls research of the meaning and research of the cause. Psychoanalysis is on the latter side, with the Freudian unconscious being “the place of another demonstration, that of the chain of desire.”[11] This is the side of the belief of the divided subject, the side of consent to blindness.[12] We can then construct a table, where natural science stands opposite hermeneutics and psychoanalysis stands opposite the epistemomania of paranoia. I think that we could place cospirationalism somewhere between hermeneutics and paranoia in a way that it be opposed to both natural science and psychoanalysis.
Roger Litten points out that conspiracy theories “constitute a floating mass of unstable and interchangeable significations not organized into any coherent discourse”, thus offering “momentary hooks.”[13] Scott Wilson has demonstrated how our age of surveillance capitalism assumes “a subject of psychosis rather than neurosis,” completely bypassing the parlêtre as such.[14] We should not fail to recognize in the phenomenon of conspiracism a longing for a consistent Other, for the “pacifying regime of the father,”[15] a longing which nevertheless remains fundamentally inconsistent and abortive. Jacques-Alain Miller has remarked that the age of consumption, the age of the Other doesn’t exist, where the discourse of the Other appears to be “pulverized, fragmentary, and floating,” is also the age of a generalized debility, that of the continuous deliberation of the ethics committees.[16] Endless deliberations flourished during the covid-19 pandemic. To this generalized debility corresponds perhaps the generalized disbelief and, also, the often stunning logical inconsistency of contemporary conspiracism. Psychoanalysis as a “directed paranoia” (Lacan) is what can possibly allow a parlêtre to order the elements of a discourse around the axis of transference, to elaborate a question, and to extract a signifier that would enable the naming of jouissance and the construction of a symptom.[17]
[1] Miller, J.-A., Cause et consentement, 1987-1988, (annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris III), lesson of 25 November 1987, unpublished.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lacan, J. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Ed. by J.-A. Miller. Trans. by Alan Sheridan. London: Hogarth, 1977, p. 238.
[4] Laurent, D., En quoi la forclusion du sujet par la science laisse-t-elle le champ libre aux paranoïas collectives ?. UFORCA (2021), accessible online https://www.lacan-universite.fr/en-quoi-la-forclusion-du-sujet-par-la-science-laisse-t-elle-le-champ-libre-aux-paranoias-collectives/
[5] Ibid.
[6] Lacan, J. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Op. cit., p. 238.
[7] Miller, J.-A., Cause et consentement, 1987-1988, op. cit., lesson of 16 December 1987.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid, my emphasis.
[11] Laurent, D., En quoi la forclusion du sujet par la science laisse-t-elle le champ libre aux paranoïas collectives ?, op. cit.
[12] Double- and triple-blind research has been the golden standard of evidence-base medicine for the last 30 years.
[13] Litten, R., From Paranoia to Conspiracy Theory, The Lacanian Review, 10 (Fall 2020), p. 227.
[14] Wilson, S., QAnon and the Subject of Surveillance Capitalism, The Lacanian Review, 10 (Fall 2020), p. 173-174.
[15] Laurent, D., En quoi la forclusion du sujet par la science laisse-t-elle le champ libre aux paranoïas collectives ?, op. cit.
[16] Miller, J.-A., L’Autre qui n’existe pas et ses Comités d’éthique, 1996-1997, (annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris III), lessons of 20 and 27 November 1996.
[17] Litten, R., From Paranoia to Conspiracy Theory, op.cit.