Mathematization of Science

The mathematization of science, as Zupančič deploys the concept in What Is Sex?, names the epistemic-ontological operation by which modern science—inaugurated with Galileo—does not simply describe a pre-existing natural world but actively produces its object through mathematical formalization. Nature, after this Galilean threshold, retains no sensible substance in excess of what is required for science's own mathematical formulas to function: the "real" object of science is not given in experience but constituted through the formal apparatus brought to bear on it. This is not merely an epistemological claim about method; it is a strong ontological claim that the mathematized object is the object of science, that there is no residue of "nature-in-itself" standing behind the formula that the formula fails to capture.

Zupančič draws on this Lacanian account of science to stake out psychoanalysis's own realist credentials. If science produces its object through mathematization, then the charge that psychoanalysis lacks access to an independent Real—the charge lodged by both naïve realism and Meillassoux-style speculative realism's appeal to the "Great Outside"—misses the point. The Real with which psychoanalysis works is not a raw outside to discourse but a structural impossibility immanent to discourse itself, just as the scientific real is not found behind the formula but at its internal limit. Mathematization thus functions here as an analogy and a model: it shows that producing an object formally is a legitimate form of realism, not an idealist evasion of it.

In what-is-sex-alenka-zupancic (p. 87), the mathematization of science occupies a pivotal argumentative position: it is the hinge between Zupančič's critique of correlationism and speculative realism's "Great Outside" on the one hand, and her defense of a distinctively Lacanian realism on the other. By invoking the Galilean production of nature through mathematical formula, she aligns psychoanalysis with modern science not in terms of empirical method but in terms of ontological structure — both generate their object rather than passively representing a pre-given one. This move directly cross-references the Real: the Real that psychoanalysis engages is not a brute Beyond (which would reproduce the fantasy of a "Great Outside") but, as the canonical definition confirms, a structural impossibility produced by and within the Symbolic order's own failures. Mathematization is thus a specification of how the Real is generated immanently rather than encountered transcendently.

The concept also engages Fantasy and Correlationism (cross-referenced but without a supplied definition here). The fantasy of the Great Outside — the naïve realist dream of stepping entirely outside discourse to touch raw being — is precisely what the mathematization argument dissolves: nature has no sensible substance beyond what the formula requires, which means there is no unmediated outside to desire or appeal to. The concept functions in the corpus as an extension of Lacan's theory of science (sketched in Seminar XI and elsewhere) into a contemporary realism debate, and as a specification of the Real as produced-rather-than-given. It does not appear elsewhere in the 82-source corpus, making it a local, polemical tool in Zupančič's argument rather than a recurring Lacanian term of art.

What Is Sex?Alenka Zupančič · 2017 (p.87)

after Galileo, 'nature does not have any other sensible substance than that which is necessary to the right functioning of science's mathematical formulas'.

The phrase "no other sensible substance than that which is necessary to the right functioning" is theoretically loaded because it converts mathematization from a mere methodological choice into an ontological determination: "sensible substance" — ordinarily the domain of empirical, pre-theoretical nature — is here entirely subordinated to and constituted by the demands of formal functioning. This collapses the gap between the formal apparatus and its supposed referent, providing the structural precedent for Lacan's claim that the Real is produced immanently rather than encountered as an outside.