The article discusses the relation between psychoanalysis and philosophy from the perspective of love. But psychoanalysis demonstrates that this love is possible only based on a return to the origins of psychoanalysis where a new modality, or a new image of love is invented in connection with transference. As in philosophical love for knowledge, transference love presupposes a “ready made” operative knowledge which serves the analyst in the interpretation of a double supposition: besides knowledge, it also presupposes its subject: the (...) subject supposed to know. The problematic of transference love is then linked to Lacan's final elaborations of the unconscious in relation to the real. The passage from transference unconscious to the real unconscious abolishes the love for knowledge, but the inverse movement provides ground for a “new love” to emerge, love as invention. The two modalities of love are discussed in connection with Lacan's formulas of sexuation and with the question of the inexistence of the sexual relation. (shrink)

The paper discusses the relation between psychoanalysis and science from the perspective of formalization and contingency. It departs from the role of biology in Freud, pointing out the insufficiency of his scientific preferences to account for the specific epistemological status of the unconscious and sexuality. Lacan’s notable reference to mathematical formalization then appears as a critical response to Freudian scientism. The paper in particular underlines the relation between formalization and contingency, which for Lacan was the central issue not only of (...) psychoanalysis but also of modern science. This problem is addressed in reference to the polemic between the philosopher Émile Boutroux, who advocated the idea of the contingency of natural laws, and the mathematician Henri Poincaré, who decisively rejected Boutroux’s “speculations”. The paper then concludes with a brief outline of the main features of Lacan’s use of formalization, focusing especially on the “mathematization of the non-all” in which Lacan saw the point of encounter between scientific thinking and the real. (shrink)