Indefinite Judgment

Indefinite judgment, as mobilized by Copjec in her reading of Lacan against Kantian logic, names a precise logical operation that must be distinguished from both affirmative and negative judgment. In standard propositional logic, "the soul is mortal" is affirmative and "the soul is not mortal" is negative—both presuppose a determinate predicate applied within or denied of a closed domain. An indefinite judgment—Kant's third, often overlooked, category—does something structurally different: it affirms a negative predicate ("the soul is non-mortal"), which neither places the subject within the positive domain nor simply excludes it, but instead opens an indeterminate, unlimited field beyond the boundary of the positive. Copjec deploys this structure to decode Lacan's formula "La femme n'existe pas": the non-existence of Woman is not a negation (she is denied existence) but an indefinite affirmation (she ex-sists in a non-positive, unlimited register). This is the decisive logical move that distinguishes "not-all" from mere incompleteness or external limitation; it means that Woman's exclusion from the symbolic is simultaneously her constitutive mode of being in relation to it.

Crucially, this structure mirrors Kant's mathematical antinomies, where reason reaches an internal limit—not a barrier imposed from outside but a point where the totalizing drive of reason runs up against its own impossibility. For Copjec, this is precisely what the symbolic's relation to Woman enacts: no metalanguage can anchor a judgment of her existence, because the predicate negated is not her being but the closure of the domain that would contain her. The result is that Woman becomes the product of lalangue—a symbolic that has no Other capable of completing or verifying it—and "other jouissance" names the mode of enjoyment that corresponds to this indefinite, non-totalizable position. Indefinite judgment is thus not a logical curiosity but the structural hinge between the formulas of sexuation, the incompleteness of the symbolic order, and the Real of feminine jouissance.

This concept appears in Copjec's Read My Desire (radical-thinkers-joan-copjec-read-my-desire-lacan-against-the-historicists-verso, p. 224) as the logical key to unlocking Lacan's "not-all" and feminine sexuality. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonicals: it is a specification of Negation (distinguishing indefinite affirmation of a negative predicate from simple logical denial), a logical grounding for Not-all (the pas-toute formula is precisely an indefinite judgment, not a quantificational gap), and a structural explanation of Feminine Sexuality (Woman "does not exist" in the symbolic in the indefinite sense, which is why no definite article "The" can precede her). It also connects to Lalangue, since the symbolic without an anchoring Other—the condition the indefinite judgment produces—is exactly the register of lalangue: language that proliferates without metalinguistic guarantee. The concept further illuminates Castration and Other Jouissance by clarifying that the internal limit reason encounters is not phallic lack (castration as negative predicate applied within the phallic domain) but the affirmation of a non-phallic predicate opening onto an unlimited, non-totalizable jouissance. Finally, its resonance with Extimacy is notable: the indefinite judgment places Woman at an internal-yet-exterior limit of the symbolic, structurally homologous to extimacy's inside-that-is-also-outside topology. Within Copjec's own argument, the concept is the anti-historicist polemical edge: it shows that Lacan's logic of Woman is not a culturally relative discursive exclusion (ideology as false limit) but an internal, constitutive limit of reason itself.

Read My Desire: Lacan Against the HistoricistsJoan Copjec · 2015 (p.224)

it is possible to pass to his conclusion only if one takes the penultimate statement as an indefinite judgment... what is involved here is not the negation of a copula... but rather the affirmation of a negative predicate.

The quote's theoretical charge lies in the precise triple distinction it draws: between (1) the "penultimate statement" read as ordinary negation, (2) "the negation of a copula" (which would deny the predicate-relation entirely), and (3) "the affirmation of a negative predicate"—the indefinite judgment proper. By insisting that the last is what is "involved," Copjec transforms Lacan's formula from a claim about women's social exclusion into a claim about the logical structure of reason itself, where affirming a negative predicate opens an unlimited, indeterminate field that no positive symbolic totalization can close.