(2025) | Series of photographs

‘What is collected in the fall has to be conserved. This is the first of the laws [of thermodynamics]. There is unfortunately something that disappears in the interval, or more exactly does not lend itself to a return to, to restoring, the starting point. […]

Doesn’t this discourse which, essentially, gives primacy to everything at the beginning and at the end and neglects everything in between, which may be of the order of something arising from knowledge, placing these pure numerical truths, that which is countable, on the horizon of a new world signify, all by itself, something completely different from the increasing role of absolute knowledge?

Isn’t this very ideal of a formalization in which henceforth everything is merely to be counted — where energy itself is nothing other than what is counted, than what, if you manipulate the formulas in a certain way, always turns out to add up to the same total — the rotation, the quarter turn, here?

Doesn’t this make it the case that in the place of the master an articulation of completely new knowledge, completely reducible formally, is established, and that in the slave’s place there emerges, not something that might be inserted in no particular way into this order of knowledge, but something which is its product instead?’

Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII (The Other Side Of Psychoanalysis)