The concept - thought of as a Borromean Knot

FARRÁN, ROQUE

International Journal of Zizek Studies

Open Humanities Press

Lugar: Leeds - UK; Año: 2009 vol. 3 p. 1 - 22

1751-8229

My point of departure is the following hypothesis: the concept is a Borromean knot. Accordingly, this is not only about speaking analogically of knots or semantic networks - metaphors that usually abound in the field of the social sciences, but of the effective articulation of three registers: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. We follow here a process of complex articulation which is, simultaneously, historical and structural: (1) of the Aristotelian idea of concept / sunstance as a simple grid or square, radically taxonomic and imaginary; (2) to the idea of functional concept, made explicit by Cassirer and rather symbolic, where what is priviledged is the operation of allocation of certain terms to a place (the function continues to be more important that the terms, there is a hierarchy); (3) up to the idea of the concept as pure relation or knot, where the terms and their very connective operations are equivalent. For this reason, a concept does not depend only on historical definitions but on a singular loop that in addition to (1) the dimension of meaning/signification as one of its parts (the imaginary register) also includes (2) the (signifying) symbolic function that corresponds to the synchronic or structural dimension of the concept proper as well as to (3) the real register of the same concept, which refers to the indiscernible dimension of the multiple under study and implies the present understood as (an) open problematic multiplicity.