Did Spinoza like Coffee Without Milk or Coffee Without Cream

If one group prizes themselves according to their terrible humor, it is the French philosophers of the 20th century. One of Jacques Lacan's more famous jokes goes as follows: one day Spinoza goes to a coffee shop and asks for a cup of "coffee without cream," and the barista replies "I am sorry sir, we are all out of cream, but I can get you coffee without milk."

Bro thought he was cooking with this one.

This joke is intended as a critique of Spinoza's conception of negativity. To Spinoza, negativity is merely the barrier, the "fence" around reality. It is of privation--a lack of reality or perfection without any positive existence. And in his metaphysics, negation is simply the finite mode's inability to express the Substance's full essence. Lacan sees this interpretation as flawed: negation does bring positive content. For Lacan, negation inhibits language from expressing the Real, constituting this lack at the center of the Subject and its ontology, creating what he coined the split-subject. This split in the subject is precisely what gives the subject its identity--the tension of negation does bring positive content.

Hence this joke: Spinoza's negation of coffee with cream ("coffee without cream") and coffee without milk are the same--black coffee. This negation brought precisely the positive content Lacan was talking about. There exists a symbolic difference despite both negations referring to the same thing, and this difference creates different realities. "Without cream" and "without milk," two ontologically similar negations, structure desire differently: without milk and without cream entail the desire to not want a latte or to not want cream coffee--two inherently different desires.

The true relevance of this joke is perhaps the clue it offers on the form in which Hegelian negation carries out. Here, the symbolic structures desire--reality. Perhaps the form in which Hegelian negation drives the world forward is precisely of the symbolic. Now we can perhaps see the concept of retroactivity take its full form--the operations of the symbolic sublate the actual material substance.