Koerner, Emmanuel <br/><br/>
Counting, Beyond the Wall. Lacan’s Question to Michel Foucault 

 -  2022.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 99 
<br/><br/> When Michel Foucault attended Lacan’s seminar on May 18th 1966 the subject was Velazquez’s Meninas that Foucault himself had commentated on in the first chapter of “The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences” ( Les mots et les choses). Lacan praises the work and asks a question: beyond the limitations of a system of thought in a given period, are there certain questions that are always structured in the same way, whatever the period, for example the question of the essence of truth? Frankly, can one not grasp it “ more directly”?Among the chapters of The Order of Things (representing, speaking, classifying...) Lacan observes that counting is not to be found (the number, algebra, topology). Desargues’ projective geometry is not part of Foucault’s plans. And yet it is this that enables one to go beyond Foucault’s descriptive study of Las Meninas, thus topologically inscribing the a object of the gaze, revealing the painting as representative of the representation.Michel Foucault remained silent and did not answer the question that he was asked.But this was taken up again, six years later (...Or worse), from Vinci’s writings. On the walls there are mould stains, awakening the imagination to make out figures. There are gully formations for speech and discourse. There is life (mould) and all it contains. But all this is a screen for the real beyond the wall, the real of the number, of algebra, of the functions of topology, devoid of meaning. Science is the only discourse that holds behind the wall. There we find counting. We are beyond the Foucault forms, in the impossible real, the non-transgressive. It is from this real that Lacan lays the non-transgression of the formulas of sexuation. This wall split is not without resonance in the present context of gender debates, in which Foucault serves in part as a guarantee.