Pataphilological Lacan

“What is ’Pataphysics?” asks the cover of the Ever-green Review in 1960.1 Alfred Jarry defines ’pata-physics this way: “[’]Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the proper-ties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments.”2The prefix pata, a symbiosis of meta and para, achieves a lettric instance of liminality that “extend(s) as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics.”3 Jarry emphasizes that the neologism ’pataphysique should be written with an apostrophe at its beginning to avoid punning on the word—puns such as patte à physique, which means “the flair of physics.”4 Christian Bök details several other potential puns, such as épatée physique(“astounded physics”), pas ta physique (“not your physics”), and puns on Jarry’s iconic Father Ubu: “Ubu, for example, is a slap-stick comedian (pataud physique) of unhealthy obesity (pâteux physique),” and so on.5 ’Pataphysics emphasizes wordplay and stylistic invention through a philological aphasia that reveals what is concealed within language; for this reason, it is already so closely linked to etymology and philology that, as James Zet-zel asserts, any philology is already ’pataphilology.6 Zetzel points out that according to Martianus Capella the god Mercury mar-ries a mortal woman named Philology; but he reconfigures this marriage as a love triangle, since Zetzel situates Philology as a twinned being composed of both philology and ’pataphilology or “Mistress Grammar.”