The Forgotten Torah and the Formation of the Talmudic Subject

Abstract

The account of the fetus learning the Torah in its mother’s womb, forgetting it and reacquiring it (b. Niddah 30b) has often been compared to Plato’s doctrine of recollection or anamnesis. This essay argues that such a comparison is misguided, as the Talmudic story does not include the recollection of the forgotten Torah, nor does it address the philosophical difficulties that inform Plato’s doctrine, which arise from a commitment to a two-world ontology. Indeed, the story may be seen as an example of the general absence of a transcendent realm in the Talmud. In Plato’s stead, I argue that Lacan’s formation of the subject offers a more fruitful comparison, and that the Torah-learning fetus may be interpreted as an attempt to overcome the Lacanian moments of alienation that result in humanity’s tragic fate.

1. Introduction

One of the best-known statements in rabbinic embryology comes from the second-generation Amora Rabbi Simlai:

Rabbi Simlai offered the following scriptural interpretation: To what is the fetus akin in his mother’s womb? To a folded writing tablet at rest [מונח]—its hands are on its temples, its two arms on its two knees, and its two heels against its two buttocks; its head rests between its knees, its mouth closed and its navel open … and a burning lamp is on its head and he gazes from one end of the world to the other, as it is written “[Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God preserved me;] When his lamp shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness” (Job 29:2–3) … And there are no more blessed days for a person than those … And they teach [the fetus] the entire Torah as it is stated, “‘Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments, and live” (Proverbs 4:4) … and when he enters the air of the world, an angel comes and strikes him on his mouth and causes him to forget the entire Torah.

(b. Niddah 30b)1

Gwynn Kessler’s study of rabbinic embryology notes the tendency of the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud to “imagine the fetus as themselves” (Kessler 2009, p. 41), and this passage is an important prooftext. Such imaginings are, of course, inevitably tied to cultural and intellectual assumptions, and it is worth inquiring after the broader context that animates this narrative. A natural starting point for such an inquiry is the significant body of scholarship that links Rabbi Simlai’s fetus to Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis. This teaching, whose most robust presentations are found in the Meno and the Phaedrus, holds that the soul, prior to its incarnation, views the realm of the Forms and learns their eternal truths, but forgets what it acquired once it is incarnated.2 The similarity is obvious—both sources hold that individuals are granted the highest form of knowledge prior to birth, but subsequently forget it—and has been the basis for discussion among rabbinics scholars for more than a century, as even a cursory list makes evident. Manuel Joël, a Wissenschaft scholar and Geiger’s successor as the chief rabbi (Reform) of Breslau, first introduced Plato into the discussion of Rabbi Simlai’s fetus (Joël 1880, pp. 118–19, vol. 1), followed by the Israeli historian Yitzhak Baer, who further developed Joël’s approach (Baer 1958–1959). More recently, Daniel Boyarin has adduced the similarity as possible evidence for Hellenistic cultural influence within Babylonia (Boyarin 2009, p. 138), and David Flatto uses the passage to contrast Greek and Rabbinic thought (Flatto 2009).3 The present essay consists of two parts. It challenges the filiation between Rabbi Simlai’s fetus and anamnesis, using the critique as a point of entry into a broader discussion of the assumptions animating earlier scholarship. It then argues that a more conceptually productive comparison is available in the work of Jacques Lacan.

The comparison between Rabbi Simlai and Plato falls short on several fronts. One objection involves the weight some scholars place on these sources, that is, the usually implicit assumption that they function as synecdoches for their respective cultures. Rabbi Simlai represents “the rabbis,” who in turn stand in for “Judaism,” while anamnesis is firmly “Platonic,” and therefore a surrogate for “Greek philosophy” or “Greek culture.” Neither view withstands scrutiny. Rabbinic literature varies according to author, period, and geographic location, and in any case represents only one modality of Jewish existence; anamnesis appears in several dialogues, but is replaced by dialectic in Plato’s later works, so it is not straightforwardly “Platonic,” and certainly not exemplary of Greek philosophy as such. More granular doctrinal distinctions that are often overlooked include the religious and gender implications of the Talmud’s focus on fetal Torah study, which marks fetal development—a universal human experience—as Jewish and male (Kessler (2009) is exceptional in this regard). Plato, in contrast, takes pains to underline the universal nature of anamnesis when he has an uneducated slave recollect the geometric knowledge his soul acquired but had since forgotten. Further, Rabbi Simlai’s forgotten knowledge is linguistic, while Plato’s is visual, a significant distinction for the Lacan-informed interpretation I offer below. The most consequential failure of the Rabbi Simlai-Plato comparisons is their tendency to employ the doctrine of anamnesis divorced from its broader philosophical context. Once restored, this context reveals fundamental difficulties regarding the pertinence of anamnesis to the Torah-learning fetus, paving the way for a thorough reconsideration of the Talmudic passage.

2. Anamnesis

Anamnesis appears in Plato’s middle dialogues, often in conjunction with the concept of the Forms, ideal entities that are both the fullest and most real beings and the guarantors of true knowledge. Ontologically, Plato emphasizes the eternal and unchanging nature of the Forms, and, consequently, their transcendence from the material world, which is a site of change and instability. Epistemologically, true knowledge that can only be grounded in the Forms is contrasted with mere opinion that derives from sense perceptions.4 The Timaeus offers a concise summary of these positions:

As I see it, then, we must begin by making the following distinction: What is that which always is and has no becoming, and what is that which becomes but never is? The former is grasped by understanding, which involves reasoned account. It is unchanging. The latter is grasped by opinion, which involves unreasoning sense perceptions. It comes to be and passes away but never really is.

(Tim 27d-28a).5

What Timaeus, the speaker in this passage, does not note (though he will do so later in the dialogue) is that the Forms’ ontological and epistemological roles are in tension: the same transcendence that insulates the Forms from the vagaries and flux of the material world situates them beyond the grasp of most modes of human knowledge, which in turn makes it difficult for the Forms to serve as guarantors of certain knowledge.

The Forms’ ontological separation from the material world means that they cannot be by the senses, rather knowledge of the Forms must be pursued “with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception” (Phaedo 65e–66a). But what precisely does this mean? Broadly speaking, Plato offers two answers. In the later dialogues knowledge of the Forms is achieved through dialectic, and in the middle dialogues through anamnesis.

Anamnesis is introduced in the Meno, where Socrates guides a slave with no mathematical education through geometric problems: the effect of doubling the length of a side of a square on the square’s area, and the derivation of an eight-square-foot square from a sixteen-square-foot square. Notably, Socrates does this without providing geometric instruction and having ascertained that the slave has received no education—how then can the slave reach the correct conclusions? This is only possible, Socrates reasons, if the slave was exposed to geometric truths prior to his birth: “If he has not acquired them in his present life, is it not clear that he had them and had learned them at some other time? … the time when he was not a human being?” (Meno 86a). In which case, the knowledge lay dormant in the slave, forgotten until Socrates’ questions prompted its recollection, that is, its anamnesis. The Meno, however, does not provide an account of how the slave acquired this knowledge, a task Plato takes up in the Phaedrus.

In the second major exposition of anamnesis, the Phaedrus examines the source of the knowledge to be recollected. In an extended mythological discourse incorporated into his second speech, Socrates describes a procession of gods and other immortal beings that Zeus leads to the edge of the universe, a vantage point from which the reality beyond the heavens is visible. The gods gaze on this reality, as does “the mind of any soul that is concerned to take in what is appropriate to it and so is delighted at last to be seeing what is real and watching what is true” (Phaedrus 247d)—that is, the soul of the philosopher. The sight in question is, of course, non-sensory. It occurs prior to the souls’ incarnation, so we cannot be dealing with a corporeal sense of sight, and the realm beyond the heavens is in any case “without color and without shape and without solidity … visible only to intelligence, the soul’s steersman” (Phaedrus 247c–d). These non-sensory sights are stored in the soul but forgotten when the soul is incarnated. The possibility of their recollection depends on the ability of the philosopher to recognize the link between the material entities that populate the world of the senses and the Forms in which they participate (a beautiful object in Beauty, a just deed in Justice, and so on). Though the Forms are transcendent to our world, “a man who uses reminders of these things [i.e., of the Forms, AYI] correctly is always at the highest, most perfect level of initiation,” (Phaedrus 249c). This is most emphatically the case with the Form of beauty, which is distinguished for the clarity with which it manifests in the material world:

Justice and self-control do not shine out through their images down here, and neither do the other objects of the soul’s admiration; the senses are so murky that only a few people are able make out, with difficulty, the original of the likenesses they encounter here. But beauty was radiant to see at that time when the souls, along with the glorious chorus [of the gods] … saw that blessed and spectacular vision

(Phaedrus 250b–c)

The encounter with earthly beauty, then, most readily triggers anamnesis—the sensory sight of material objects recalls the soul’s forgotten non-sensory sight of the Forms.

At this point, the philosophical function of anamnesis is evident: it resolves the tension between the Forms’ ontological and epistemological functions. The Forms’ transcendence poses an epistemological challenge that Plato here seeks to resolve through the mediation of the soul; the soul transports knowledge from the transcendent realm into the material by means of the two modes of vision. Non-sensory vision is housed in the soul and so belongs to the transcendent realm, but qua vision it is kindred to its sensory counterpart, such that certain mundane sights can effect a recollection of the forgotten. Anamnesis, then, aims to overcome the epistemological difficulties of an ontology committed to the transcendence of true being.

To what extent is Platonic anamnesis analogous to the Talmud’s Torah-studying fetus? Even recognizing that an imperfect analogy can be illuminating, it appears that Plato’s doctrine is structurally incompatible with Rabbi Simlai’s narrative. First, because the subject of this narrative is the physical fetus, not the soul of the unborn child. This distinction requires emphasis, because scholars have deliberately sought to efface it. Manuel Joël presents Rabbi Simlai’s teaching as part of a rabbinic doctrine of the soul (Seelenlehre), whose elements include the soul’s instruction in the entire Torah and its initial ignorance following its entry into the world.6 Baer follows Joël on this point and while he recognizes that Rabbi Simlai never mentions the soul, Baer insists that the psychical meaning of the passage becomes clear once “we excise the matters concerning the child’s dwelling in its mother’s womb, which were interpolated by later bizarre copyists. For it is impossible to claim that a fetus in its mother’s womb ‘gazes from one end of the world to the other’, but only that the soul does so when it is situated above the rim of the heaven, as is the case in Plato’s Phaedrus” (Baer 1958–1959, pp. 18–19). But Joël’s claims have no textual support and Baer’s are philologically baseless7—a testimony to Baer’s ardent desire to align Rabbi Simlai with Plato, nothing more.8 Second, and this point is closely related to the preceding, because the fetal Torah does not appear to have an epistemological function. Simply stated, the introduction of Plato into the analysis frames the Rabbi Simali narrative in terms of anamnesis, even though the narrative itself does not recount a moment of later recollection—the fetus learns Torah in the womb, forgets it at the moment of birth, but does not recover it at a later point. Despite the regnant view of earlier scholars, then, b. Niddah 30b does not contain an instance of anamnesis and, in consequence, the comparison with Plato ought to be discarded.

3. Talmudic Immanence

“If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here,”

(Milosz 2001, p. 679)

Though the anamnesis interpretation of the Talmudic fetus does not withstand scrutiny, it is instructive insofar as it lays bare a key assumption that frames much of the scholarly engagement with the Talmud. Namely, the belief that something akin to the transcendent realm of Plato’s middle dialogues can be seamlessly superimposed onto the conceptual world of the Talmudic sages. For it is this implicit and constitutive assumption that has underwritten the Platonic interpretation of Rabbi Simlai’s fetus for more than a century, and that so plainly animates Baer’s rage against the “bizarre” copyists who corrupted the text and obscured its original, Platonic orientation. Interpreters following in the footsteps of Joël and Baer might concede that Rabbi Simlai does not explicitly introduce transcendent elements, while holding that the implicit presence of such elements can be safely assumed on broader cultural and religious grounds. There is, to be sure, a miraculous dimension to Rabbi Simlai’s narrative, one that could readily be framed in terms of a transcendent realm: God or another divine being communicates the content of the heavenly Torah to the soul of the unborn (male) child. At every juncture, however, the Talmudic narrative rejects the transcendent approach. The identity of the instructor is never disclosed, and the Talmud offers only a laconic and impersonal melammdim oto, “they instruct him” or “one instructs him.”9 The presence of the angel at the moment of birth is often (I suspect unwittingly) read back onto the pedagogic section, but there is no textual basis for this move; and, as noted, it is the physical fetus that learns the Torah, not the metaphysical soul.10 Moreover, the Torah in question is not characterized as transcendent or heavenly, but rather, by all indications, is the same Torah that the fetus’ future self will study in the rabbinic bet midrash. The result is a curiously immanent miracle that transforms the womb into an ersatz bet midrash—a space in which the physical fetus is taught the earthly Torah.

Finally, it is worth considering the Talmud’s use of its biblical prooftexts. Baer rebukes the putative later scribes for placing a lamp on the head of the fetus so that he can gaze from one end of the world to the other. In one sense, Baer’s criticism fails to recognize that Rabbi Simlai is drawing the lamp motif from Job 29:3, which he invokes as a prooftext (“When His lamp shone over my head, when I walked in the ark by his light”).11 In another sense, Baer is right to call attention to the odd image that results. The biblical verse, after all, plainly uses ner (“lamp” in all major English translations) figuratively. Looking back on happier times, Job laments: “O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me, when His lamp shone over my head, when I walked in the dark by its light, when I was in my prime, when God’s company graced my tent” (Job 29:2–4). Here, as in many biblical passages, ner is in parallelism with ᾽or, “light,” and roughly synonymous with it.12 Consequently, the verse does not obligate Rabbi Simlai to interpret ner as a physical oil lamp. Once the verse was exegetically repurposed as a referring to the gestating fetus, the Hebrew allows for—indeed invites—an interpretation of ner as “light,” presumably God’s light that illuminates the fetus immersed in Torah. Rabbi Simlai refuses this invitation and instead places an oil lamp—a burning lamp no less—on the head of the fetus. Moreover, it is worth noting that the lamp detracts from the miraculous claim that the fetus “gazes from one end of the world to another,” as Rabbi Simlai’s implicit claim is that this would not have been possible except for the lamp perched on the fetus’ head. Rabbi Simlai’s narrative, then, not only omits those elements that could sustain a transcendent understanding (God, heavenly Torah, the soul), it interprets the biblical prooftext in a manner that highlights the materiality and this-worldliness of the in-utero Torah study.

It would appear that the transcendent interpretation of b. Niddah 30b must be rejected. But is this rejection apt to the Torah-studying fetus alone, or does it redound to the Talmud more broadly? Is it justified, in other words, to assume that the Talmud, by virtue of its “religious” themes and concerns, is inherently oriented toward the transcendent, or should this view be discarded?13 The Talmud, which famously avoids abstract theological discourse, contains no programmatic statement on such matters. There are, however, strong indications that the kind of transcendence familiar from Plato is foreign to the Talmudic sages. To make this argument, I want to call attention to the important shift evident in the transition from tannaitic sources to the Talmud.

As Abraham Joshua Heschel has shown in his Theology of Ancient Judaism, the early rabbis engaged in a spirited debate over the nature of the divine, to the point that one can speak of two tannaitic schools divided on the question of the image of God—Rabbi Akiva’s anthropomorphic approach, on the one hand, and Rabbi Ishmael’s more transcendent view, on the other.14 The textual sources Heschel adduces are well known and there is no need to rehearse his arguments about divine anthropomorphism, except to note that this tannaitic debate, like the anti-anthropomorphic commitments of the Aramaic Targums,15 is largely absent from the Talmud. The Talmud plainly represents God in thoroughly anthropomorphic terms, e.g., laughing, teaching and studying Torah, wearing phylacteries, sporting with Leviathan, writing the Torah, and more.16 These sources are of course not new, but what is changing is the growing scholarly recognition that they cannot be glossed over as “mere” rhetoric. As Jacob Neusner has written, “… if [the rabbis] used anthropomorphic language, as they did, the reason was not that they were not afraid of the ‘danger’ of anthropomorphism, but rather that they were not aware that it was a danger to begin with, but found it quite natural and normal for their theological thought.”17

Allow me to provide a more robust example involving the theological ramifications of divine worship, and more specifically of sacrifice.18 As Heschel recognized, tannaitic debate extends to the question of sacrifice: does God need human sacrifice? Is God appeased by the pleasant smell of burnt offerings? Or, alternately, are these anthropomorphic traits foreign to God, in which case biblical sacrifices must be reframed in different terms.19 The debate plays out primarily on the exegetic plane and along Akiva-Ishmael school lines. Thus, we find an anti-anthropomorphic argument in the commentary to Numbers, which is associated with the School of Rabbi Ishmael:

“… a pleasing odor to the Lord” (Num 28:8): […] “I know all the birds of the air … If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and all that is in it is Mine” (Ps 50:11–12).20 I might understand that eating and drinking exist in His presence, but Scripture teaches saying “Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” (Ps 50:13). Rather, why did I say to you “make me an offering?” In order to fulfill your will. And thus it says, “When you sacrifice a thanksgiving-offering to the Lord, you shall sacrifice it according to your will” (Lev 22:29).

(Sifre Numbers §143)21

The homily begins with God’s statement in Psalm 50:12, “If I were hungry …” which suggests that God experiences hunger, but this interpretation is refuted by the rhetorical question posed in the subsequent verse: “Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?” (Ps 50:13). If so, what is the function of sacrifices? According to the Sifre, “To fulfill your will”—a lapidary characterization of sacrifice as a deontic act whose religious significance lies in obedience to God, not in any benefit it provides to the divine. The homily then quotes Leviticus 22:29, “When you sacrifice a thanksgiving-offering to the Lord, you shall sacrifice it li-retzonkhem,” “according to your ratzon.” In Biblical Hebrew, ratzon means “favor, acceptance,” as the NRSV rightly translates “When you sacrifice a thanksgiving-offering to the Lord, you shall sacrifice it so that it may be acceptable in your behalf.” In Rabbinic Hebrew, however, ratzon comes to mean “volition, will,” and this is the sense operative in the homily: God only commands sacrifices “to fulfill your [i.e., Israel’s] will.” On this interpretation, sacrifices address a human need, not a divine one.

On the other side of the debate, we find a full-throated rabbinic defense of God’s corporeality:

“They have ears, but do not hear; noses, but do not smell” (Ps 115:6): “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?” (Exod 15:11) [Who is like You] among those whom others call god? What is their nature? […] “They have ears, but do not hear” (Ps 115:6). However, it is not so with He who spoke, and the world came into being. Rather, “O You who hears prayer! To You all flesh shall come” (Ps 65:2) … “[They have] noses but do not smell” (Ps 115:6). However, it is not so with He who spoke, and the world came into being. Rather, “a pleasing odor to the Lord” (Lev 1:10).

(Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai Beshalah 15)22

Psalm 115:6 enumerates the deficiencies of idols as evidence of their status as manmade artifacts—though they are fashioned with ears, they do not hear, though they are fashioned with noses, they do not smell, and so on. The Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimon, which is associated with the School of Rabbi Akiva, adduces verses that emphasize God’s sensory abilities: “O You who hears prayer!” (Ps 65:2), and “a pleasing odor to the Lord”. The theological distance from the Sifre Numbers could not be greater. God’s corporeality is not a scandal to be interpreted away—it is evidence of God’s vitality and power.

As in the case of God’s image, the lively Tannaitic debate over the theological implications of sacrifice does not continue in the Babylonian Talmud. The Talmud never mentions many key anti-sacrifice verses, including 1 Samuel 15:22 (“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obedience to the voice of the Lord? Surely, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams”), Hosea 6:6 (“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt-offerings”), and Psalm 40:6 (“Sacrifice and offering You do not desire … Burnt-offering and sin-offering You have not required”). Other anti-sacrifice verses are cited but their meaning redirected, as with the prophet Micah’s declaration that God holds ethical action in greater regard than sacrifice: “Shall I come before [God] with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with tens of thousands of rivers of oil? … what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6–8). The Talmud (b. Sukkah 49b; b. Makkot 24a) cites the biblical teaching concerning justice, lovingkindness, and humility, but omits mention of the prophet’s critique of sacrifice.23 As with the anthropomorphic image of God, one cannot speak here of immanence sensu strictu, but a pervasive acceptance of the notion that sacrifices appease God, and the absence of anti-anthropomorphic critique, is incompatible with a transcendent understanding of the divine.

What emerges, then, is that the Babylonian Talmud does not consider divine anthropomorphism and anthropomorphic interpretations of ritual to be a problem in need of resolution. So much so, that pre-Talmudic rabbinic voices advocating for a more transcendent understanding of God leave no significant mark on the Talmud. God looks and behaves like a human being, and human interaction with God is informed by these assumptions. Shifting our focus back to the Rabbi Simlai passage, it is clear that there are no grounds for the wholesale importation of transcendence into the narrative, whether as Platonic anamnesis or as any other form. The materiality of Rabbi Simlai’s narrative—the physical fetus, the earthly Torah, the transformation of the womb into a rabbinic house of study, the lit lamp on the fetus’ head—is, in fact, fully congruent with the Bavli’s dominant theological voice. But if the Torah the fetus acquired is not heavenly and is, moreover, never recollected, what is the function of b. Nidda 30b’s in-utero Torah study? In what follows, I will argue that Jacque Lacan’s theory of the development of the subject offers a productive perspective.

4. Lacanian Alienation

The introduction of psychoanalysis at this point is prima facie curious, given the field’s structural similarity to Platonic anamnesis in as far as both seek to recover the forgotten.24 Of course, Freud’s forgotten lies “beneath” our conscious state, as it were, while Plato’s lies “above” it. As a result, psychoanalysis strives to raise the unconscious up into our waking consciousness (“wo Es war, soll Ich werden”), whereas for Plato waking consciousness is itself the site of forgetting and, as such, that which is to be transcended in order to (re)gain access to the Forms. Still, the dynamic of recollection is similar in the two cases. As is the case with anamnesis, psychoanalysis identifies a region that had previously been experienced but was since “forgotten,” namely, the unconscious. In both cases, forgetting denotes a principled loss of access (rather than a temporary lapse of memory), and in both cases, the philosopher/analyst must exploit the fissures through which traces of the forgotten enter our world to gain as much access as possible to this realm. For Plato, the fissures are the dim, material copies of the transcendent Forms—beautiful objects, just actions, moderate lives that evoke the soul’s memory of the Beautiful, the Just, and the Moderate that the soul viewed before incarnation. For Freud, the fissures are the dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue through which the unconscious communicates with our conscious selves. Both Plato (again, in certain dialogues) and Freud understand their respective fields as a type of therapy25 aimed at gaining more sustained access to the forgotten realm.26 Will the introduction of psychoanalysis, then, not lead to a similar aporia as did Platonic anamnesis? Only if the comparison is based on the traditional Freudian notion of recollection. In what follows, however, I focus on Lacan’s theory of the formation of the subject, which, I argue, offers a more apt comparison to the Talmud’s forgetful fetus.

One important qualification. Lacan is a famously complex thinker, who elaborated and revised his theories over the course of his life. My present discussion is by no means exhaustive. It is a brief and necessarily partial summary of certain key points, first and foremost Lacan’s three registers (or orders)—the real, the imaginary, and the symbolics—and the centrality of alienation to the formation of the Lacanian subject.

4.1. The Real

I begin with the register that precedes alienation, at least from the perspective of the subject (I will explain this qualification below), namely, the real. The real is one of the most difficult concepts in Lacan’s oeuvre, in part because it undergoes significant modification in his writings. In the 1950s, when the notion of the real most relevant to the present analysis is elaborated, it designates what might be called the prehistory of the subject: a state that precedes the emergence of the subject because “there is no absence in the real” (Lacan 1988, p. 313) and therefore no division or distinction.27 In this state of fullness, the distinctions constitutive of subjecthood cannot be maintained. The infant cannot recognize itself as a defined entity set apart from the external world because “regarding externality and internality—this distinction makes no sense at all at the level of the real. The real is without fissure” (Lacan 1988, p. 97). As Bruce Fink writes,

Lacan’s real is without zones, subdivisions. localized highs and lows, or gaps and plenitudes: the real is a sort of unrent, undifferentiated fabric, woven in such a way as to be full everywhere, there being no space between the threads that are its ‘stuff.’ It is a sort of smooth, seamless surface or space which applies as much to a child’s body as to the whole universe.

(Fink 1995, p. 24)

This fullness, this pleroma, cannot even admit of a grammatical subject, since language “is a succession of absences and presences, or rather of presence on the background of absence, of absence constituted by the fact that a presence can exist” (Lacan 1988, p. 313).28 If so, a register that does not know absence cannot know language, and vice versa: we who find ourselves “within” language have no access to the register that is prior to any conceptualization, as “we have no means of apprehending this real—on any level and not only on that of knowledge—except via the go-between of the symbolic [i.e., of language; AYI]” (Lacan 1988, p. 97). As a result, the discourse surrounding the real is apophatic and can only be approached by via negativa. There is no alienation in the real, but only because there is in it no subject who might sustain this alienation. The emergence of the subject in the transition from the real to the imaginary is, then, coincident with the emergence of alienation.

4.2. The Imaginary

Lacan locates the initial formation of the subject in the register of the imaginary, the gateway to which is, in Lacan’s terminology, the mirror stage. The mirror stage is anchored in Lacan’s observation of “the jubilant interest shown by the infant over eight months at the sight of his own image in a mirror. This interest is shown in games in which the child seems to be in endless ecstasy when it sees that movements in the mirror correspond to its own movements” (Lacan 2003, p. 300). Such behavior is uniquely human: chimpanzees recognize the illusion (the animal in the mirror is not really there) and quickly lose interest in it. The human infant, in contrast, reacts with joy because the reflected image represents a stage in the formation of the subject that “situates the agency of the ego, prior to its social determination” (Lacan 2006, p. 76 [MS]). For the first time, the child grasps the reality of its body and recognizes its own existence as belonging to an integral, physical whole. It now possesses an image of itself and so has entered into the register of the imaginary.29

The mirror stage and the entry into the imaginary register represent the initial step in the formation of the Lacanian subject, a subject that already at this point is ruptured or barred, as the infant’s perception of physical integrity is inconsonant with their somatic reality: “Now the child’s behavior before the mirror is so striking that it is quite unforgettable … and one is all the more impressed when one realizes that this behaviour occurs either in a babe in arms or in a child who is holding himself upright by one of those contrivances to help one to learn to walk without serious falls. His joy is due to his imaginary triumph in anticipating a degree of muscular co-ordination which he has not yet actually achieved” (Lacan 2003, pp. 301–2). At this stage in their physical development, the child cannot yet walk, or stand, or control their bowels; they cannot, in other words, meaningfully claim to be that integral body because they do not yet have a stable relationship with it. Their joy at grasping themselves, then, is delusional or, more charitably, aspirational: “the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt … in which, to be sure, this form is more constitutive than constituted” (Lacan 2006, p. 76 [MS]). In other words, the child’s joy is based on an “illusion of unity, in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery” (Lacan 2003, pp. 302–3).30 So, for Lacan, the formation of subject is from its earliest development a matter not of recognition, since there is not yet an I to recognize, but of misrecognition.31 From the very outset, the subject is alienated from its true self, so much so that Lacan speaks of alienation as “constitutive of the imaginary order. Alienation is the imaginary as such” (Lacan 1993, p. 146).32 This condition will become more acute as the subject presses on in its development and enters into the symbolic register.

4.3. The Symbolic

I noted in the discussion of the real that this register precedes alienation “at least from the perspective of the subject”. This qualification was needed because from the broader social perspective, the infant is already in a state of alienation prior to its birth and even prior to its conception. It is in the symbolic register that the subject achieves its fullest formation, as “the essential part of human experience, that which is properly speaking the experience of the subject, that which causes the subject to exist, is to be located on the level of the emergence of the symbolic” (Lacan 1988, p. 219). Entry into this register is first and foremost entry into language, which—and this cannot be emphasized too strongly—is experienced as an alien reality. The child, after all, has no agency with regards to the acquisition of the language of their surroundings, or to the acquisition of language as such. So while we tend to frame the process in terms that highlight the child’s agency (“she learned a new word,” “she understood a new question”), and on a certain level this is true, it is arguably more accurate to say that the language has acquired a new speaker.

Language’s precedence over the subject allows it to alienate the child before their birth or conception. In relation to symbols, Lacan writes the following:

[They] envelope the life of man with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender him ‘by bone and flesh’ before he comes into the world; so total that they bring to his birth … the shape of his destiny … that they provide the words that will make him faithful or renegade, the law of the acts that will follow him right to the very place where he is not yet and beyond his very death.

(Lacan 2006, p. 231 [FF])

Phrased differently, the discourse of the parents-to-be and the social-environment-to-be carves out a symbolic space into which the child is born, so that the symbolic subject precedes the concrete human being.

An outstanding example of this alienating dynamic is the infant’s name. Names are, of course, powerful loci of personal identity; we are our name. Yet each name is a distillation of linguistic, geographic, ideological, and genealogical considerations that are completely foreign to the newborn, such that the infant is born into a foreignness readied just for her. Phil Hanley’s stand-up comedy special, “Live in Edmonton,” captures this dynamic in one of his exchanges with the audence.33 Hanley has been chatting with a woman in the audience and turns to speak with the burly man sitting beside her, who turns out to be her husband:

Hanley: “What’s your name?”

Man: “Kylie” (light laughter)

[…]

Hanley: “Do you think your parents wanted a girl?”

The audience roars with laughter because Hanley has laid bare the constitutive tension of names: they are in the deepest sense us, our most personal self, yet they are forged from the desires of others. In flaunting English gender norms, Kylie’s parents brought this tension to the fore—and Hanley exploits it to comic effect—but the underlying dynamic is present for all names. Moreover, a similar dynamic holds for the broader social environment into which the child is born—the identity of their parents, their cultural and economic circumstances, etc.—the entire web of linguistic and social realities that constitute the ego: all are foreign to the infant, who is tasked with making them part of their own selfhood. Socialization into the symbolic, then, is less a matter of the child “coming into their own,” and more of their ability to contort themselves into the socially hypostasized desires of others.

While the entire social realm is experienced by the child as alienation, language (which Lacan understands largely in Saussurian terms) is exemplary in this regard. In part, this is due to the role of the unconscious in Saussure, which is already evident in Saussure’s foundational distinction between langue and parole.34 This distinction emerges from Saussure’s attempt to establish the proper object of linguistics, one that does not involve speech, parole, which is infinitely variable: intonation, pronunciation, regional dialects, register, and more, all differ from speaker to speaker, making actuated speech unsuited for scientific research. Rather, the object of linguistic study is langue, the synchronic structure that undergirds and unifies the variety of speech. But while langue is expressed in parole, in the lived speech of a linguistic community, its speakers are not conscious of langue; speech is experienced as a self-evident reality without awareness of the structures and rules that govern it. Phrased differently, langue functions as a linguistic unconscious, a point Saussure makes explicitly in his famous analogy between language and chess: both are constituted by elements made meaningful by their relation to other elements; the system (spoken language and an unfolding game of chess) is in constant flux, but always governed by fixed rules; changes are regular but never wholly predictable, and so on. Saussure does introduce one important qualification:

At only one point is the comparison weak: the chessplayer intends to bring about a shift and thereby to exert an action on the system, whereas language premeditates nothing. The pieces of language are shifted—or rather modified—spontaneously and fortuitously … In order to make the game of chess seem at every point like the functioning of language, we would have to imagine an unconscious or unintelligent player.

(de Saussure 2011, p. 89)

The Lacanian subject’s entry into the symbolic, then, situates him within a language whose rules remain hidden from him and that lie outside his control, even as he comes to think of himself as the master of language. I wonder, in fact, if Saussure’s chess-language analogy still holds once we recognize that the chess player is conscious of his rules, while the speaker is not. This qualification strikes me as more radical than Saussure allows, for it transforms the speaker from a chess player to a chess piece. To be sure, if chess pieces were suddenly granted the gift of speech they would assert their own agency. But in this they are no different, and no less mistaken, than Spinoza’s falling stone.

Two other aspects of Saussurian linguistics are relevant to the alienation native to the symbolic register. One is Saussure’s definition of the linguistic sign. Where earlier thinkers presented the sign as a linguistic unit (generally a word) that signifies an object in the world, for Saussure, the linguistic sign is the union of a sound pattern and a mental concept, such that both the signifier and the signified are “internal” and signification does not involve an extra-linguistic state of affairs. This reformulation, which is key to Saussure’s linguistics, situates the speaker irrevocably “within” what Frederic Jameson would call the prison house of language, alienated from the surrounding world.

The other aspect is the importance of difference in the generation of linguistic meaning. For Saussure, and for structuralism more broadly, meaning emerges from the relation between the elements of a structure. To take the most basic example, a sound is linguistically meaningful—becomes a phoneme—if its opposition with another sound distinguishes between two words. In Spanish, r and trilled rr are phonemes because there is at least one word pair whose meaning is distinguished by the opposition of these sounds (e.g., pero, ‘but,’ and perro, ‘dog’). There is no such word pair in English, so the r/rr opposition is not semantically significant. An English speaker can, of course, trill their r, but this will register as a matter of accent or pronunciation—the sound has no inherent meaning outside of its position within the structure. Linguistic meaning, then, arises from the difference between elements, by what the element is not rather than what it is. This negativity underwrites the entire register of the symbolic, which is, Lacan states, “simultaneously non-being and insisting to be” (Lacan 1988, p. 326).35

Language, by its very nature, then, engulfs the speaker in alienation: she has no knowledge of the structure and rules governing language; the linguistic sign traps her within the realm of the signifier, denying her access to the world; and linguistic meaning is generated by difference, rendering language a realm of non-being.36 Lacan adds to these a specifically psychoanalytic element: the need, set forth programmatically in “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” to recognize “the functions of speech and the field of language” for the field (Lacan 2006, p. 201 [FF]). That is, to acknowledge that psychoanalytic technique is founded on concepts that “take on their full meaning only when oriented in a field of language and ordered in relation to the function of speech” (Lacan 2006, p. 205 [FF]). For parole, actuated language governed by rules inaccessible to the speaker, is the medium of the Freudian unconscious.37 “Psychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech” (Lacan 2006, p. 206 [FF]), as it is through the speech of the patient that the unconscious speaks. The psychoanalytic unconscious, then, expresses itself through a medium whose inner workings remain unconscious to the speaker.

Here lies a decisive difference between Saussure and Lacan. For Saussure, langue may be unconscious, but this does not hinder the speaker from fully and immediately giving their conscious thoughts linguistic expression. For Lacan, following Freud, speech is split: it expresses, to the best of its abilities, the conscious thoughts of the speaker, while simultaneously serving as the medium of the unconscious’ own expression. Speech is split because the subject is split. Its ego inhabits the symbolic register, whose resources it uses to construct its conscious understanding of itself and the world, but its unconscious remains unknown and inaccessible. So, one must always ask: qui parle? Who speaks? Does the spoken I refer to the speaker’s conscious self or to their unconscious? As Lacan writes, “the point is not to know whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather to know whether, when I speak of myself, I am the same as the self of whom I speak” (Lacan 2006, p. 430 [IL]).38 And elsewhere: “All analytic experience is an experience of signification … What analysis reveals to the subject is its signification. This signification is a function of a certain speech, which is and which isn’t the speech of the subject” (Lacan 1988, pp. 325–26). This insight points to the depth of human alienation: a being defined since Aristotle by its ability to speak, but whose speech, we come to recognize, is not truly its own.

In light of the above, it is not surprising that Lacan’s writings are riddled with references to the tragedy of human existence. Already at the mirror stage, the need to maintain the wholeness and integrity of the reflected image, “is surely related to that agony or dereliction which is Man’s particular and tragic destiny” (Lacan 2003, p. 304; emphasis added). Later he writes that since “we’re captive of this essentially alienated life” (Lacan 1988, p. 233), there can be no recoverable ideal state, no Ithaca to which we might return. “That is what life is—a detour, a dogged detour, in itself transitory and precarious, and deprived of any significance” (Lacan 1988, p. 232). Small wonder he speaks with such admiration of Sophocles’ ability to have the chorus of Oedipus at Colonus declare that “the greatest boon is not to be.” “It is quite striking,” Lacan states, “to realise that for the greatest tragedian of Antiquity, this was to be found in a religious ceremony. Can you imagine that being said during mass!” (Lacan 1988, p. 233).

5. Rabbi Simlai

If the development of the Lacanian subject resolves in tragedy, Rabbi Simlai’s narrative offers an antidote—really, a series of antidotes—to the alienation in which Lacan roots this tragedy. At the risk of stating the obvious, I am not endorsing an anachronistic reading in which Rabbi Simlai is consciously responding to Lacanian or proto-Lacanian concepts. What I am suggesting is that Rabbi Simlai is elaborating, in a typically non-theoretical rabbinic discourse, an account of the emergence of the (or a) Talmudic subject. This subject is inoculated from the alienation that is so central to Lacan, principally because it emerges into the world already imprinted with language, the language of Torah.

The introduction of a linguistic dimension—Torah study—into the womb means that the Talmudic subject is socialized prior to birth. In Lacanian terms, fetal exposure to language contravenes the notion that entry into the symbolic, into language, represents a transition into an alienated realm. Though the Torah acquired in the womb ceases to be part of the subject’s conscious self at the moment of birth, the child nonetheless does not acquire language for the first time as a toddler. As Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (writing from within the Platonic paradigm) notes: “There is an obvious question: If the angel makes the baby forget everything that he taught it, why did he bother to teach the embryo at all? The answer is again obvious. R. Simlai wanted to tell us that when a Jew studies Torah he is confronted with something which is not foreign and extraneous, but rather intimate and already familiar, because he has already studied it, and the knowledge was stored up in the recesses of his memory and became part of him” (Soloveitchik 1978, p. 69). In Lacanian terms, the symbolic register cannot be foreign to the Talmudic subject because it is present within him before birth.

We saw above that for Lacan, as for Freud before him, the subject is fundamentally split in a way that forces the question who speaks? The conscious self does not, by definition, enjoy access to the unconscious, so the unconscious has no choice but to make itself known by entangling the ego in its snares. This is not the case for the Talmudic subject, whose forgotten realm is the Torah itself, and so long as he studies Torah, there is full identity between his conscious and unconscious. Fetal Torah study, then, obviates the need to ask who speaks? since both “voices” of the Talmudic subject—the unconscious and the conscious—speak Torah. Remarkably, Lacan himself alludes to such a dynamic. I quoted above his statement that signification “is a function of a certain speech which is and which isn’t the speech of the subject.” Lacan then notes: “I don’t know if that is the original master word of the Book of Judgment in the Rabbinical tradition. We aren’t searching that far off …” (Lacan 1988, p. 326).39 The precise sense of this statement is not clear to me, as I am not certain what Lacan’s “Book of Judgment” denotes.40 It appears, however, that he is drawing an analogy between the unconscious speaking through the subject’s conscious self, on the one hand, and a rabbinic tradition in which a religious discourse of some sort speaks through the rabbinic subject. Irrespective, Rabbi Simlai’s fetus will grow up inoculated from the alienation manifested in the question qui parle?

The Talmudic subject is also protected from the alienation that occurs at the very outset of Lacanian subject’s formation, in the discrepancy between the integrity of the mirror image and the reality of the toddler’s unruly body. The Talmudic subject, in contrast, is physically stable from the first: “To what is the fetus akin in his mother’s womb? To a folded writing tablet at rest [מונח]—its hands are on its temples, its two arms on its two knees, and its two heels against its two buttocks; its head rests between its knees, its mouth closed and its navel open.” It is also, as the governing simile of the passage makes clear, textual, its physical integrity likened to that of a writing tablet. The difference between the Rabbi Simlai’s and Lacan’s subject can be expressed in temporal terms: In the Lacanian mirror stage, physical integrity exists in the temporality of the future anterior, the anticipatory what-will-have-been “in which a human being is always looking forward to self-mastery” (Lacan 2003, pp. 302–3). The Talmudic subject, in contrast, grasps its physical image in the temporality of the pluperfect—seeing itself through the prism of what it had always already been. In this, Rabbi Simlai’s narrative also opposes the Lacanian real, the register that precedes all difference and therefore does not allow for the emergence of subjectivity. The Talmudic subject of b. Niddah 30b has no prehistory; it is always already permeated with language, which is to say, with difference: its body is a writing tablet and its mind acquires Torah.

The tragic fate of Lacan’s subject contrasts—and thus highlights—the ways in which Rabbi Simlai’s Talmudic subject is safeguarded from alienation: the body it inhabits, the language it acquires, the social world into which it enters—all are from the outset native territory. But at what price? Soloveitchik, not surprisingly, views Rabbi Simlai’s fetus in idealized terms: “Once man gains insight into his true self, by activating the intellect, he finds himself on the road towards discovering ultimate redemption. When man recognizes himself, he dissipates not only ignorance, but also the mist of anonymity. He is not unknown anymore: he knows himself, and finds freedom in his knowledge” (Soloveitchik 1978, p. 70). Yet, like all defensive mechanisms, the constitutive role of Torah in the formation of the rabbinic subject comes at a price. For one, it is only Torah that affords protection from alienation. The subject’s entry into the social world and the unity between its conscious and unconscious are only free of alienation on the condition that it enters the world of Torah and speaks the language of Torah. In other words, it is only the symbolic world of the rabbis that inoculates the subject from alienation. The subject finds, in Soloveitchik’s terms, “freedom in his knowledge,” but only by relinquishing the freedom to choose a life outside rabbinic Torah discourse.

The full surrender to Torah carries a further price. Lacan describes entry into the register of the symbolic as becoming subject to a “primordial law” that “superimposes the reign of culture over the reign of nature” (Lacan 2006, p. 229 [FF]). The most fundamental instantiation of this law is the incest prohibition, a prohibition that psychoanalytic doctrine associates with the father, so that it is “in the name of the father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law” (Lacan 2006, p. 230 [FF]).41 For the Talmudic subject outlined in b. Niddah 30b, in contrast, the Torah—the Law—is the only law; Rabbi Simlai divorces the gestation and birth of the child from any familial context and reframes them instead in terms of rabbinic socialization. The tension is evident the Talmud’s citation of Provers 4:4 as the prooftext for its claim that “they teach [the fetus] the entire Torah.” The verse, “‘Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments, and live,” describes the transmission of Torah from one generation to the next: “Listen, children, to a father’s instruction, and be attentive, that you may gain insight, for I give you good precepts: do not forsake my teaching. When I was a son with my father, tender and my mother’s favorite, he taught me and said to me, ‘Let your heart hold fast my words; keep my commandments and live’” (Prov 4:1–4). In Rabbi Simlai’s narrative, however, the father and mother have been supplanted by the Torah, and the Law that is no longer given in the name of the father.

I noted above that Lacan’s (Saussurian) understanding of language lends itself to an interpretation that strips the subject of agency, rendering them less akin to a chess player than to a chess piece. The imposition of Torah as the determining factor at both the initial emergence and later maturation of the Talmudic subject suggests a similar dynamic. True, the subject avoids the Lacanian alienation of entry into a foreign symbolic order, but only by becoming the medium of another symbolic order—maintaining a single, unvarying symbolic register from fetal existence to adulthood. The Talmudic subject is, in the final account, a hollow conduit for Torah discourse. Since the Torah learned in the womb is the same as the Torah learned later in the rabbinic bet midrash, it recurs as mere repetition, what Lacan calls “a language devoid of dialectic … in which the subject, one might say, is spoken instead of speaking” (Lacan 2006, pp. 231–32 [FF]). Such speech—the speech of Rabbi Simlai’s Talmudic subject—“has given up trying to gain recognition” (Lacan 2006, p. 231 [FF]) and so becomes, for Lacan, a symptom of madness.