Abstract
This essay offers a psychoanalytic reading of Nikola Tesla’s remarkable text My Inventions, a series of articles published in 1919 for the Electrical Experimenter magazine, edited by Hugo Gernsback (Tesla, 2011). The paper argues that the famous ‘elementary phenomena’ described in these articles operate as proto-linguistic elements or enigmatic ‘signifiers’ that form the basis of his subsequent scientific inquiry. These articles demonstrate that unusually for a scientist, Tesla did not give up on the object cause of his knowledge nor on his own position as the subject of his inventions – indeed I argue that his inventions were the means by which Tesla created and realized himself as a subject. I discuss in particular two of Tesla’s inventions: the Rotating Magnetic Field, that is the basis for the AC induction motor, and the Magnifying Transmitter in the context of Tesla’s own accounts of their ‘psychological’ genesis. I will suggest that it was through these electrical inventions in particular that Tesla managed to design a form of subjectivation that enabled him to stabilize his schizophrenic symptoms and disclose the coherence and efficacy of knowledge and delusion. In so doing Tesla’s inventions perhaps point the way towards the delivery of science as ‘a successful paranoia’, in the terms of Jacques Lacan.
Highlights
In ‘Science and Truth’, the final chapter of Écrits (2006), Jacques Lacan suggests that should science come to a point of closure it would constitute ‘a successful paranoia’ (p. 742)
We can say that our epoch – in so far as it is determined by the applications of scientific discourse in conjunction with capitalism – is relatively
It is the coherence between delusion and knowledge that enables paranoia to stabilize schizophrenic symptoms in psychosis
Summary
In ‘Science and Truth’, the final chapter of Écrits (2006), Jacques Lacan suggests that should science come to a point of closure it would constitute ‘a successful paranoia’ (p. 742). The Name of the Father is the phrase that Lacan uses in his teaching of the 1950s to describe the function of the signifier to locate the position of the subject and ground the symbolic order through the promise of meaning That it is named after the father is a historical contingency; any signifier can function in this way so long as one believes in it – ‘Woman’, for example. As Freud’s case studies continually show, belief in the father is a neurotic symptom; the impact of a signifier such as the Name of the Father that is for Lacan the material cause of the (neurotic) subject is rejected by both science and psychosis, as can be seen in nineteenth century scientific texts, and in the Memoirs of Daniel Paul Schreber (2000). Further – assuming we grant this terminology any kind of theoretical efficacy – the re-incorporation of psychoanalysis as a discipline in a redefined idea of science
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