Triplicity in Spencer-Brown, Lacan, and Poe

Abstract

When speculative realists argue that objects should be considered apart from subjects, they frequently call on the support of George Spencer-Brown’s ‘calculus of indications’; however, they domesticate binary oppositions (e.g., day/night, good/bad, etc.) at the expense of the radical antagonism of Spencer-Brown’s identification of indication with distinction, a ‘pre-Boolean’ alliance that echoes Lacan’s own topologies of the ‘extimate’ (inside-out). Antagonism is not so easily dispelled. Speculative realists should accept the ‘thirdness’ that Spencer-Brown and, later, Lacan employ strategically to address central questions about self-reference. I use evidence from Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ to show how much Lacan’s, Freud’s, and Spencer-Brown’s ‘triplicities’ have to offer to the project of the nonhuman.