Lacan and Anscombe on Chance and the Divine

A quick commentary on the role of chance in metaphysics.

The following text will not be written in the way I usually consider appropriate for writing: a beginning, middle, and end, with a coherent argument developed throughout the text. What I sought to do here is take a single illustration, that of receiving a letter, through which two very different philosophers (or a philosopher and a psychoanalyst), Lacan and Anscombe, attempt to "scratch" at a domain of questions that is usually difficult, if not impossible, to address conceptually.

The general idea is that there exists a set of questions concerning our relationship to concepts such as fate, luck, randomness, and death, which modern thought typically tends to suppress and push as far as possible into the background. Lacan and Anscombe use the illustration of receiving a letter from an unknown sender to tackle some of these issues that personally interest me. This text aims to offer a taste, to stimulate intellectual curiosity toward these questions.

To understand Lacan's position on the issue at hand, it is necessary, at the very least, to offer a clarification that serves as an interpretation of his thought. The difficulty requiring such clarification does not stem, as in some writings of thinkers like Derrida, from Lacan being an obscurantist. On the contrary, the challenge arises because Lacan saw himself as a psychoanalyst, a member of a distinct scientific discipline with its own specialized conceptual vocabulary. Historical psychoanalysis, in turn, not only failed to follow his path but also lost even the potential momentum it could have had as an analytical tool for meaningful examinations.

Nevertheless, the need to clarify and interpret Lacan’s thought arises because he did not adopt the medical ethos of psychoanalysis. Instead, he embraced an existential-philosophical ethos: for him, psychoanalysis is "the first philosophy." As such, some of his ideas are relevant to topics connected to this perspective.

For example, Lacan interprets the Freudian-psychological principle of the "compulsion to repeat" in terms of what he calls "the insistence of the chain of signifiers." Before continuing, it is essential to conceptually clarify what is meant by "signifier" as opposed to "sign." This distinction was inherited by structuralist thought, including Lacan’s, from the famous linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Originally, the distinction was between a "sign," whose referent is a representation or object, and a "signifier," whose reference is to a "signified."

From a linguistic perspective, a sign is semantic: the words "morals" and "מוסר" (musar) point to the same meaning, representation, or message. Therefore, when translating content, we agree to interchange these signs, which connect through a shared meaning. However, from the perspective of the signifier, "morals" and "מוסר" are entirely different signifiers. The signifier—its sound, spelling, typography, in short, its entire "material" aspect—may, and historically has, pointed to very different meanings.

In this view, the signifier is considered superior to the signified in explanatory significance. Signifiers are historically variable, as the same signifier can point to entirely different meanings at different times. Moreover, in pure structuralist thinking, the signifieds that a signifier points to are themselves seen as potential signifiers. More precisely, the signifier always indicates a signified by pointing to something it has not yet signified.

When Lacan speaks of "the insistence of the chain of signifiers," he refers to something more complex. On the surface, he means that the same signifier "moves" between different signifieds but actively conditions the possible content of those signifieds. The example Lacan gives is "the letter" in Edgar Allan Poe's story The Purloined Letter. The "letter" is, in fact, "the subject" (metaphorically, though perhaps literally for Lacan) that commands the characters in the story.

In Lacan's view, a person, as such, does not possess autonomous subjectivity either potentially or actually. Rather, the subject is constituted by the signifier that asserts control over them. The signifier, in this sense, not only "activates" the person but also constructs them through the dynamics of changing signifiers. This is the "symbolic order" that constitutes the subject, and Poe's story illustrates how the dynamics of a single signifier (the letter), rooted in its nature, can demonstrate this point.

From another perspective, the process can be described as follows: the signified remains in its pure state. The subjects who "hold" and "exchange" the signifier essentially play roles assigned to them from the "place" of the signifier. The place of the signifier delineates the boundaries of the subject and, as such, is for the subject what Lacan calls "the absolute Other." The exchange process of the signifier is what Lacan calls "the symbolic order."

However, a further complexity must be introduced here. The signifier cannot be a subject in the same sense we are accustomed to characterizing subjects—whether as sovereign beings, property owners, titleholders, agents, or logical subjects. Lacan is compelled to resort to an incomplete analogy (essentially Thomistic in disguise) to characterize his signifier. If there exists a realm of subjects, of beings, then the pure signifier (not as an object of exchange but as the subject of the exchange) cannot be characterized in terms of being.

The reason is simple: if the signifier were merely exchanged, the question of whether to keep or pass it on would be entirely up to a specific person. However, if the signifier possesses its own "mechanism" governing the exchange covertly, it must, in a sense, act upon the subjects. To explain this, Lacan employs sophisticated analogies from number theory (cryptography) or topology.

In The Purloined Letter, the police search the minister's rooms using the most advanced tools, examining furniture surfaces for hidden compartments, calculating furniture dimensions for concealed spaces, and meticulously inspecting drawers for documents. For Lacan, the police are searching for the pure signifier, the driving force behind their actions, within the geometric space of the room. But what they are truly doing is searching for the signifier among extant beings.

The letter was simply lying in the room, torn and battered yet intact—not dissected like the space where the police fruitlessly searched. Dupin, the detective brought in by the police, immediately understood how they were "searching." All he needed to do to claim the reward was enter the apartment and take the letter.

Lacan compares this search process to looking for a misplaced book in a library: the best hiding spot for the book is within the library itself, just in the wrong location. Anyone searching by catalog and relevant sections would still fail to find it. The absence of the book from its proper place drives the seeker. Its eventual discovery, though seemingly accidental, was already inscribed in the symbolic order. Lacan compares Scheherazade’s repeated storytelling, intended to delay the signing of her death sentence, to a gamble involving the search for the book. Every successful story merely opens the way for the next one. The pursuit of the signifier ends with death, which, of course, moves on.

Lacan here is reminiscent of Joyce, a devout atheist Catholic. Providence does not hover above randomness once immersed in the sign of God, even if God himself has receded into the unconscious. In Lacan's view, the mechanism of the “insistence of the chain of signifiers” operates as automatically as natural selection, even if its objects are symbolic. Moreover, signifiers—whether ideas, things, or objects—are fully material. They may 'carry' spirit or subjectivity for a time, but these will remain forever mute without the metabolism of signifiers.

The most ludicrous part of Lacan’s commentary on his seminar comes when he tries to do what Poe attempted—to distract the reader with a speech containing a ridiculous attempt to refute a certain mathematical statement. He tries to demonstrate that the psychoanalyst could theoretically reveal the recurrence of the subject's determination and set rules for it, as though the subject were one of Mendel’s flowers. He reads one of Freud

’s early neurological psychology books as an unsuccessful Maxwell to a Faraday that never was. All he manages to show is that the seemingly random regularity might not need an additional explanation beyond the mechanism of pure insistence.

Now, let’s consider a related parable Anscombe explores in her lecture “On Belief,” borrowed from Peter Geach. Anscombe investigates the concept of "belief" through its biblical meaning. For her, this meaning resonates not in the way we discuss religious "faith" (which supposedly exists even among Buddhists, though she sees this as foreign to their tradition) but rather in everyday phrases like “I believe so-and-so.” "Why do you think it will rain today?" "Well, because I believe what so-and-so said." This concept of belief, she argues, originates in biblical faith, where God is the primary object linked to such belief.

However, the conditions for believing someone are more complex than they seem at first glance. If I receive a letter from my friend John announcing his wife’s death, I don’t believe the letter; I believe John, which gives me trust in what the letter says. Anscombe's subtle point is that believing John requires several assumptions: (1) John exists, (2) he wrote the letter, and (3) the letter means what I understand it to mean. Under normal circumstances, there’s no reason to doubt any of these assumptions, though they can surface under certain conditions.

Anscombe provides an example where a gap may exist between these assumptions and the conclusion. Suppose some friends invent a person named "Otis Otison" as a prank. Otis starts corresponding with me, sharing various pieces of information. After an extended correspondence that builds trust, someone asks me about a subject, and I reply, "I believe Otis Otison." Should we say I didn’t truly believe Otis because he doesn’t exist? This seems odd, as if we’ve shifted into a technical language from an alternate universe where we have perfect knowledge of the people we trust. According to Anscombe, we should avoid this artificial explanation and simply say, "He believed Otis, his nonexistent friend."

Similarly, she argues that ancient believers in oracles and gods like Apollo weren’t mistaken in believing Apollo. Claiming they "actually believed a hallucinating drugged woman" feels artificial. The straightforward explanation is that they believed Apollo—existent or not.

Anscombe asserts that, in ordinary circumstances, the implicit assumptions behind believing someone are not questioned and thus aren't what we mean when we say, “I believe so-and-so.” But to clarify her point, she constructs a hypothetical scenario: Imagine being in prison and receiving a letter from "Otis Otison," offering advice that miraculously improves your prison conditions. You begin to trust Otis, even though you initially doubted his existence. Thus, the assumption that Otis exists can come after belief has already been established.

From here, Anscombe reaches the topic that truly interests her: belief in God (or more precisely, belief toward God). She quotes Suárez, who asserts that "in every revelation of God, He reveals that He is revealing Himself." This sounds like saying that every letter from Otis reports that the writer is Otis, and each additional letter provides more information that sheds light on the fact that the first letter was indeed from Otis. Clearly, this is absurd—a case of infinite regression. But, according to Anscombe, this is not the correct way to frame it. Every letter from Otis would contain a claim, implicit or explicit, that Otis is sending us information.

In the case of God, there is an added difficulty. So far, we’ve considered cases where the meaning of believing someone is relatively clear. A person hears a voice and believes what the voice says because they believe the voice came from God. But what does it mean in this context to "believe God"? Anscombe argues that it would be absurd to think that belief in God here means believing that God has a voice box. In relation to belief in God, it doesn’t matter how the voice was produced.

Here, Anscombe draws on what she calls a rabbinic notion of the "bat kol" (a heavenly voice) and provides an example with an autobiographical undertone: You are standing in a large crowd and hear a woman speaking to her friend, but something about her voice "jumps out at you," "speaks to you." Perhaps someone in the crowd heard a person say, "Why are you wasting your time?" That person had been contemplating, delaying, and planning to become Catholic for some time. The voice struck their heart and compelled them to obedience. They didn’t believe that the person speaking meant anything remotely related to them—but they believed that God spoke to them through that voice.

Anscombe, of course, gives the famous example of Augustine, who heard "Take up and read," prompting his conversion process.

Anscombe's emphasis, as her examples demonstrate, is transformative. Like Lacan, the idea is that, in a sense, you are "ruled" by the signifier. Unlike Lacan, Anscombe assigns a particular role—yet to be clarified—to the information conveyed in this process. However, both face a deeper difficulty concerning what I consider the most neglected topic in modern thought: fate, luck, chance, and everything deriving from them.

Returning briefly to Lacan, at one point he explicitly asks: If we indeed possess a signifier with no possible signified, what exactly is that signifier? In his view, in this case, we encounter the figure of the compulsive gambler:

Indeed, this is the question that led the minister to him, if he truly is the gambler we are told he is... For the gambler's passion is none other than that very question posed to the signifier, represented by the automaton of chance. 'What are you, the number on the die I roll in encountering you (tyche [fate, luck, divine act, etc., in Greek]) with my fortune? Nothing—unless you are that very presence of death that turns human life into the reprieve granted from morning to morning in the name of the meanings your sign is the shepherd's staff for. So Scheherazade did for a thousand and one nights, and so have I for these past eighteen months, experiencing the supremacy of this sign at the price of a dizzying series of rigged throws in the game of odd or even.'

Lacan identifies the necessity of death with the inevitability of the persistence of the chain of signifiers. As mentioned, we are not bound by that persistence—but the question he raises shifts our discussion to a fertile ground. Death necessarily possesses a finality and inevitability that recolors our lives, even if it occurs only temporally at the end.

"Alright," we might say to Anscombe, "suppose you’re right." What does it mean that we might receive a letter from ourselves? Is the information it carries the point, or is it the mere fact that we received a letter? Anscombe hints, in her shift from the prison analogy, at the purpose of the signifier: an amorphous hope for liberation. But, as with transformation, we are not necessarily compelled to accept the implications of her words here.

Regarding Lacan, we might ask more technical questions: Is the psychoanalyst not concealing death from themselves and others when seeing it as entirely equivalent to a mechanical mechanism? The challenge for Lacan in this case would be not to locate the initial point of the subject’s fixation within the persistence of signifiers, but rather to find the endpoint.

Overall, the usefulness I see in juxtaposing these discussions lies in reopening questions about fate and luck—questions I am exploring in other contexts. Anscombe's discussion, for example, is highly significant if we wish to talk about the relationship between prayer—especially that which addresses "deep questions within us"—and God’s providence in our world. Lacan’s discussion has the advantage that, precisely when he moves beyond psychological mechanisms and discusses intersubjective dynamics that supposedly occur in some way in our world, we can observe, at least in principle, how something like providence might function.

Of course, these questions also have many non-"religious" implications: How does responsibility function among subjects acting in a world layered with contexts they did not create? How should we regard a sequence of good or bad luck? And is happiness a fixed status, or is it itself subject to reversals that come later in the temporal order?