Quaternity: How to Count from 3 to 4

Lacan says psychoanalysis is not an ontology – ontologies are a mistake. There are discourses from which the subject speaks: an empty place existent between signifiers. Badiou retorts that the ontological is accessible through the inhuman semiosis of mathematics. Yes, the philosophers of the past were mistaking the truth of being for their own desire (meaning their own subjective filtered perspective). But this does not make it any less real – just less universal. Is it possible to reconcile a scientific non-philosophy with a non-psychiatry, a non-humanist psychoanalysis? For some time I have been integrating the psychoanalytic-semiotic, philosophical-ontological, and ethical-aesthetic by means of the quaternity. Lacan’s four discourses, Badiou’s four ontologies and four subjectivities, Guattari’s four functors, Wilber’s four perspectives, and Jung’s four archetypes can be juxtaposed, overlaid and paralleled – compared and contrasted – integrated and differentiated – in a complex mathematical machine of topological and computational logic. While discourses alludes to the importance of the human subject as speaking-being, it does not resonate with the latest of Lacan’s formulations in the topological. The spatio-temporal domains of computation, fractality, quantum physics, chaos and complexity theory, along with more abstract set theory and category theory allow us to collapse artificial boundaries between human and inhuman. What is renounced as humanist is a rigid image of the moral, material, or egoic. What is re-asserted is the human as agent, actor, expressor and as perspective, lens, interpellation. This allows us to move beyond a linguistic-humanistic assumption and limitation still present in structuralism.