Transmission

Transmission, as deployed in the context of the matheme in Evans's Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, designates the specific mode by which psychoanalytic theory can be passed on without distortion or imaginary degradation. The key theoretical move is that transmission is made possible precisely through the opacity of the matheme: because the algebraic notation does not yield a univocal, imaginary meaning, it cannot be "understood" in the ordinary sense — and this is what guarantees its integrity. Transmission here is not communication in the sense of the sharing of meaning between two conscious subjects; it is rather the structural relay of a formal mark, a signifier that addresses another signifier, indifferent to whether any particular receiver grasps its sense.

This concept thus inverts the usual pedagogical logic: where ordinary teaching assumes comprehension as the criterion of successful transmission, the matheme's transmission is integral precisely because it bypasses comprehension. The matheme circulates as a pure letter — transmissible, replicable, quotable — while its meaning remains suspended, available only through the work (use) it is put to. This aligns with the broader Lacanian principle that the signifier operates independently of signification, and that the Real can only be written, not said.

Within evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis, the concept of Transmission is tightly bound to the entry on the Matheme. It functions as the telos of the matheme: the reason Lacan invents algebraic notation in the first place is to secure integral transmission of psychoanalytic theory against the imaginary distortions that natural language inevitably introduces. The concept thus presupposes and extends the canonical concept of the Matheme (whose defining characteristic is, precisely, integral transmissibility) and stands in direct contrast to the Imaginary (the register of shifting meanings, méconnaissance, and univocal semantic capture). Where the Imaginary register threatens to reduce psychoanalytic concepts to ego-level "understanding," Transmission via the matheme routes theory through the Symbolic's letter-logic, bypassing the imaginary demand for sense.

The concept also has oblique relations to Fantasy, Drive, Graph of Desire, and Objet petit a insofar as these are the primary contents that the mathemes ($◇a, $◇D, etc.) are designed to transmit. The opacity of the matheme mirrors the opacity of objet a itself — both resist full symbolization, both are passed on as formal remainders rather than imaginary presences. Transmission, then, is not a secondary pedagogical concern but a structural claim: theory that cannot be transmitted integrally is theory that has been captured by the Imaginary, and the matheme is the device that prevents this capture.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown)

they constitute a formal core of psychoanalytic theory which may be transmitted integrally; 'one certainly doesn't know what they mean, but they are transmitted'

The quote is theoretically loaded because it explicitly decouples "knowing what they mean" (imaginary comprehension) from "being transmitted" (symbolic relay), enacting in its very syntax the priority of the letter over meaning: the concession "one certainly doesn't know" is not a defect but the condition of possibility for "they are transmitted" — opacity is the mechanism, not the obstacle, of integral transmission.