"The real difficulty lies in the fact that every integer is in itself a unit. If I take two as a unit, things are very enjoyable, men and women for instance - love plus unity! But after a while it is finished, after these two there is nobody, perhaps a child, but that is another level and to generate three is another affair."

Lacan, Jacques. 1970. "Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever". In /The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man/, edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. p. 191.

Yet it tells us *something* about the current state of philosophy that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two much-idolized French philosophers, should have published a book called 'What Is Philosophy?' (1991) in which we learn that

"philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes that are not aligned with one another so that they fit together, because their edges do not match up. They are not pieces of jigsaw puzzle but rather the outcome of throws of the dice. They resonate nonetheless, and the philosophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that, while remaining open, is not fragmented: an unlimited One-All, and "Omnitudo" that includes all the concepts on one and the same plane."

Which means . . . what? Perhaps, as Messrs. Deleuze and Guattari tell us a bit later on, that "if philosophy is reterritorialized on the concept, it does not find the condition for this in the present form of the democratic State or in a cogito of communication that is even more dubious than that of reflection." Or perhaps it is just ominous-sounding nonsense.