Lacanian Concept Research Articles

아브젝트 개념으로 접근한 ‘무진’이라는 공간의 상징성

Kim Seung-ok's “Record of a Journey to Mujin” is a successful work to the extent that it has been adapted into a film among his many works. Along with this, “Record of a Journey to Mujin” is actively discussed among his works. Within it, various studies have been conducted on the symbolism of the space due to the uniqueness and imaginative nature of the space called 'Mu-jin.' Particularly noteworthy is that although the title of Record of a Journey to Mujin” includes the word 'journey' as a clue, it shows a different form from conventional travel novels. There are also studies suggesting that the space called 'Mu-jin' is not a space existing in reality but holds symbolic significance as a space that contrasts with Seoul. Among these, noteworthy are studies that adopt Lacan's concepts of the imaginary and symbolic orders. These studies analyze 'Mu-jin' as an imaginary or real space contrasting with 'Seoul,' an existing space symbolized by the symbolic order. In this paper, adopting these two perspectives, we will posit 'Seoul,' existing in contrast to 'Mu-jin,' as the symbolic order. However, there are aspects of the characteristics of the space called 'Mu-jin' that cannot be accommodated solely by Lacan's concepts of the imaginary and real orders. Therefore, by expanding and reinterpreting Lacan's studies from a feminine perspective, adopting Kristeva's concept, we aim to present 'Mu-jin' as a gathering of abjects placed in opposition to 'Seoul,' symbolized as a symbolic order, forming a 'semiotic system.'

Being and timeouts: live sports in the psyche

Despite televised sports being a non-fiction event, the gap that separates a sporting event’s live unfolding from its televisual transmission ensures that it has all the aesthetic dynamism of a dramatic series. This essay argues that the sense of liveness that undergirds a televised sports broadcast operates on the side of the viewing subject rather in the object itself. It is the psyche that makes sport live—not the broadcast. This essay looks to Freudian and Lacanian concepts and ideas from television studies to concretize its theoretical intervention.

End of jouissance, start of resentment: a Lacanian critical security approach to Turkey’s relations with the West

ABSTRACT Believing that the emotional turn in IR would benefit from psychoanalysis greatly, this study applies the Lacanian concept of ‘jouissance’, the emotional IR concept of ‘resentment’, and ‘emancipation’ as part of the Welsh School in IR to Turkey’s relations with the EU, by pointing out a visible move from former to the latter since the Helsinki Summit in 1999 until today. As known, jouissance refers to physical and/or intellectual joy, whereas resentment roots in being treated unfairly. By dividing the period mentioned above into four, 1999–2005; the period of jouissance, 2005–2011; end of jouissance, 2011–2016; transition to resentment, and 2016–2023; emancipation, the paper analyzes leader discourses of both sides through EDA, the current President of Turkey; Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; and the leaders of the European Council and European Commission, to unravel the transition. For Turkey, the AKP government utilised discourses that transitioned from jouissance to emancipation, especially after 2005, whereas the EU discourses started with jouissance and moved onto emancipation and then neutrality. As the recipient side of the accession, the EU discourses remain on the technical accession negotiations and the issue of migration after 2011 rather than engaging in any emotional attachment to Turkey’s membership process.

Mourning revolutions in the virtual anastasis

Mourning Revolutions in the Virtual Anastasis is a psychoanalytical and philosophical analysis, that places contemporary technologies and emerging practices for digital and virtual mourning into conversation with Freudian, Jungian, and Lacanian concepts. Through a series of speculations, the text wants to scrutinise the motives behind today's simulative technologies and hypothesise about the future interrelation between the individual and the absence of death. Although the argument is presented by clearly assuming a contrasting position to the use of VR high-tech novelties, the aim is still to offer a point of reflection rather than imposing a unilateral perspective. Therefore, the emphasis is placed on the multifaceted instances of virtually resurrecting loved ones and the inevitable revolutions that will be carried within the mourning process, ultimately departing from orthodox psychological views. The impacts of these revolutions are still largely obscure, but some light will be thrown by examining the internal dynamics of the individual mind and society as a whole. It will be argued how technological advancements, habitually embraced as a sign of evolution, contextualised within the main argumentation, hold a significant risk of being just an illusion of progress: a social regressive phenomenon in its enactment of unconscious fixations. Moreover, thought-provoking claims challenging the psychosocial institutions are delivered to unfold the ethical and political dynamics, particularly concerning psychoanalysis. The reader might find the role of the latter devalued in the critique engaged, in truth, the concluding argumentation is almost an ode to the practice by expressing the hope that by abandoning its tight conservative frame, such an essential tool of analysis will maintain its relevance in the 21st century. The conclusion of such an adventurous exploration will propose psychoanalysis as philosophy with a clinic.

Heterogeneity of the Freudian sign: Kristeva’s semiotic Chora and Lacan’s notion of lalangue

In this contribution, our aim is to explore and analyse the interplay between the approaches of Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan during the 1970s. By seeking to transcend the limitations inherent in the structuralist framework, both authors endeavour to introduce new concepts that can account for the heterogeneity of Freudian sign. Previous studies examining the relationship between these two authors predominantly focused on Kristeva?s critique of Lacanian structuralist theory during the 1950s. From this standpoint, the semiotic chora is perceived as a force that fundamentally challenges Lacanian concepts. However, it is important to note that Kristeva was acquainted with Lacan?s later teachings, particularly the notion of lalangue that he introduced. Our argument posits that her critique stems from a misinterpretation of certain key concepts that Lacan put forth in the 1970s. Moreover, while Lacan would abandon the dialectical relationship in favour of the logic of triplicity, Kristeva continued to engage with the notion of heterogeneity through the lens of Hegelian dialectics.

A paradigm of wholeness: an analysis of Lacan's concepts of "writing" and "picture"

The division between the subject and the object, and the knowledge of the object, is disturbing to the mind of researchers. In this article, we introduce picture and writing as two Lacanian theoretical paradigms to explain the dynamic relationship between the two sides. We probe into an essential approach of the effect of the transmission between the real and the symbolic for the subject. We review the context of these two notions and then show that these forms of art reveal a dimension of exchange between the subject and object. In this way, we form a critical view against dualism and a revelation of thinking of wholeness.

Traumatic Female Gaze: Julia Pirotte Looking at the Kielce Pogrom

In this article, I analyze Julia Pirotte’s photographs of the immediate aftermath of the Kielce pogrom as a resource for conceptualizing the relationship between trauma and photography, gendered ways of seeing, memory and trauma, body and archive, vision and death, death and the archive, images and history, survival, and destruction. These specific atrocity pictures make a difference to contemporary conceptions of trauma photography and the female gaze in relation to racist, political violence. I work with theories that go beyond thinking about trauma and photography based on the Lacanian concept of tuché on the one hand, and Barthes’ punctum on the other. I investigate to what extent Pirotte’s documentation of the Jewish victims and survivors of the pogrom can be read as a belated encounter with the trauma of the Holocaust, and what it reveals about survival at the site of violence. The article is a work of a feminist academic oriented at reclaiming a space within the narrative on visual violence; the reflection on the female traumatic gaze is an element of a broader gesture aimed at reorienting the theory of atrocity pictures and documentations of political violence, as well as photography of trauma.

Material calculation and its unconscious: approaching computerization with Heidegger and Lacan

The following paper focuses on discerning a specific epistemic effect that modern computers and especially the technology of artificial intelligence (AI) have. To discern this effect, it is necessary to reflect on the use of mathematics, that is its practice, and its ontological underpinnings. To do this, we combine Heideggerian and Lacanian concepts to approach the theoretical problem that AI and computers pose to the practice of calculation. The paper discusses that the computer as a material calculator has limiting factors that make it unable to utilize important uses of formalization. Central to this is the forced absence of virtual voids, which compels computers to act as if the symbolic would behold to the same structural axioms as the imaginary. Far from being a simple inability of computers, this proximate failure allows us instead to understand AI and modern computation in terms of their use and misuse as an epistemic tool.

Improvisation and Radical Objectivization Identities in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber: A Lacanian Reading

This research applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to scrutinize the use of improvisation and radical objectivization in Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. Drawing on Lacan's theory of the "mirror stage," the work argues that Carter's use of these literary techniques disrupts the reader's sense of identity and challenges their preconceived notions of self and other. Through close analysis of key passages from the text, the research demonstrates how Carter's use of these techniques creates a sense of alienation and fragmentation in the reader, as they are forced to confront the unsettling and often disturbing aspects of the stories. The work also explores how Lacan's concept of the "phallus" is invoked in Carter's work, as she challenges traditional gender roles and subverts the dominant male gaze through the use of powerful female protagonists. Further, it maintains that Carter's use of these techniques, offers a powerful critique of patriarchal norms and invites the reader to engage with the complex and often contradictory nature of identity and desire. By disrupting traditional fairy tale tropes and challenging patriarchal norms, Carter invites the reader to engage with the complex and often unsettling nature of identity and desire, and offers a powerful critique of the ways in which these concepts are shaped and constructed by dominant cultural narratives.

The lack and unfulfilment of daredevil: born again

ABSTRACT Serial narratives promote continuous storytelling across entertainment mediums, especially in comic books. These narratives are seemingly reflective of the never-ending plight of the superheroes and villains and their inability to ever find definitive resolutions of their struggles. Although many critics bemoan the repetition of these approaches to storytelling, seriality in comics performs a crucial function of providing readers the opportunity to connect with and reinforce the very human experience of our lives’ conflicts never really being resolved. The Lacanian concept of lack is the clearest formulation of this psychic drive. Applying this concept to a canonical comic book story arc, Frank Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again, this article demonstrates just how pervasive is the characters’ inability to truly find a sense of completion in their lives even when possessing superhuman abilities and/or access to resources, and how that absence of completion is what fuels the very nature of the serial narrative format of storytelling. The result is a richer understanding of how conflict operates in comics and how their seriality performs a conciliatory role in relationship to the human condition.

Jouissance and affective neuroscience: a critical neuropsychoanalytic integration

ABSTRACT Jouissance is a multifaceted Lacanian concept that refers to a paradoxical blend of pleasure and unpleasure, an excess of pleasure that becomes traumatic. While jouissance appears as a pinnacle of Lacanian theoretical complexity, it has been critiqued as a nebulous descriptor that shuts down questions rather than deepening rigor. Specifically, Darian Leader has charged the Lacanian use of jouissance as theoretically imprecise, ignoring vicissitudes of bodily innervation, obscuring the relationship with the Other, and implicitly maintaining problematic Freudian quantitative, homeostatic ideas. I propose that affective neuroscience, when interpreted within a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic framework, offers tools to answer some of these critiques of jouissance. At the same time, an integration of jouissance with affective neuroscience draws out radical perspectives in neuropsychoanalysis – specifically against a straightforward application of homeostasis – that demonstrate the importance of maintaining the concept of jouissance as excess. This article attempts to advance interdisciplinary dialogue in Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis.

The Lacanian Subject and the Philosophy of Education: Diagnostic with, or without, Therapeutic?

Jacques Lacan’s ethical insights come up when he engages, inter alia, with Aristotelian and Kantian ethics. Tackling Aristotle’s ethics, Lacan complicates how human life would be best lived and fulfilled, and discussing Kant’s ethics, he sheds a different light on moral duty. In both cases, Lacan emphasizes the role of desire and law in the subject’s actions. Many Lacanian insights constitute a fertile context for political philosophy and philosophy of education to explore the ethic character of the subject. However, some postmodern political philosophers who draw on fundamental Lacanian concepts have theorized the “Self–Other” relationship in a way that ends up in a problematic ontological accommodation of evil. In this paper, I outline the aforementioned to highlight the following lacuna: much of the literature in educational philosophy that has utilized Lacan’s theory to deal with ethics has not addressed, head-on, whether the Lacanian subject is ethical, unethical, or none of these. Treating the subject as ethical or unethical would entail that Lacanian theory can mainly offer “diagnoses”. Treating the Lacanian subject as ethically neutral and, thus, as plastic, entails that Lacan’s theory leaves more ample space for “therapy”. My aim in this paper is to show that some unanswered questions regarding the (un)ethical subject in Lacan’s theory must be tackled if the philosophy of education that transfers Lacan’s ideas to the ethical educational context is to avoid self-contradiction.

What Does Queer IR Want? A Queer Psychoanalytic Critique

Abstract This article presents a sympathetic critique of the concept of “queer” operative in the subfield of Queer International Relations from a psychoanalytic perspective. I first reconstruct queer International Relations (IR) in relation to disciplinary IR and queer theory, and offer an appraisal of the current state of the field's division between LGBT+ theorists and queer theorists. I then consider Cynthia Weber’s recent work and suggest that the boundary between the two camps of queer IR is precarious in that both require and presuppose an opposition to some concept of the straight world. I suggest that, thus construed, the form of the queer/straight distinction approximates that of the mirror stage Jacques Lacan theorized in the 1930s. Read through Lacan, the notion of “queer” in queer IR can be shown to reduce the concept of desire to that of identity, which precludes understanding of the political import of queerness in respect of the LGBT+ group. Finally, I apply the Freudian–Lacanian reflection on narcissism, group formation, and desire to the debate on LGBT+ rights, and conclude that attending to the Lacanian concept of pure desire (via queer readings of Antigone) may be productive for queer IR's rethinking of the deadlocks it has run into in its brief history.

On a Universal Tendency to Debase Retranslations; or, The Instrumentalism of a Translation Fixation

AbstractSome readers prefer an earlier translation in which they encounter a source text, particularly a canonized work, over later versions of the same text. The decisive encounter is so compelling as to establish an enduring attachment that entails denigration or outright rejection of later versions. Insofar as the attachment suggests obsessiveness, it can be called a fixation. The readers’ responses share features that transcend membership in specific linguistic communities and cultural institutions: they value a high degree of readability, which is construed as an indication of greater equivalence to the source text. Here the readers reveal their assumption of an instrumental model—that is, an understanding of translation as the reproduction or transfer of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, an invariant form, meaning, or effect. The fixation can be illuminated by considering the intersubjective relations in which the preferred translation is first encountered. Cases recorded or represented in literary texts enable a more incisive account of the conditions that shape the reader's experience: John Keats's poem “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” (1816) and Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin (1957). These texts disclose an identity-forming process that can be deepened with Jacques Lacan's concept of the “object a.” The instrumentalism that underpins the fixation deserves consideration because it would in effect deny or stop cultural change, innovative interpretation, the very practice of translation.

Berebut Makna Lewat Dui’ Menre’: Analisis Mengenai Ideologi dalam Perkawinan Bugis

The rite of dui’ menre’ bestowal in Bugis marriage positions women as object of exchange. However, this rite generates contradictory effect. On one hand, it is perceived as burdensome because the broom parties have to give a relatively big amount of money to the bride parties. On the other hand, the Bugenese keep running the rite. Hence, the rite of dui’ menre’ is not only a ritual of giving-and-taking money, but also an ideological conduct. There is something powerful that forces people to keep doing the rite solemnly. This research lead me to conduct this research. There are two objectives of the reserach. First, it tries to find the form of ideology and fantasy which support the rite of dui’ menre’ be towal; second, it wants to expose the Bugenese sub ject position in the face of dui’ menre’ bestowal. The fieldwork was conducted in Pinrang district, South Celebes. To discuss the matter, this research utilizes Ideological Criticism and Sexuation developed by Slavoj Zizek from Lacanian concepts. Slavoj Zizek’s Ideological Crit icism is used to find out the fantasy which supports an ideology. Meanwhile, sexuation is utilized to show the impossibility of sexual relation defined by Bugenese through dui’ menre’ r ite. Dui’ menre’ is not only a language of tradition as it were in the era of traditional authority, but also a languageof economy which makes woman as an object of exchange. Dui’ menre ‘ is a challenge that must be conquered by a man to get a woman. In the contemporary era, several forces collide. Bugis feudalism, Islam, and capitalism interweave in the same issue. In the rite of ui’ menre’, woman is reduced to be object cause of desire for man. In this symbolic realm the Bugenese subjects present and take position. Generally, there are several Bugis subject positions in responding dui’ menre’, na mely psychosis, perve rse, obsess ive neurotic, and histeria.

Sacramental desire

The work considers the theoretical dispute between different concepts of desire: "classical", structuralist, and post-structuralist. This dispute unfolds in two aspects: the social desire production and desire-scarcity connection. The author shows this dispute to be axiomatic and reflect the process of transition from an industrial society, which is based on shortage and lagging consumption, to a post-industrial society, which is based on excess and advanced consumption. The author relies on Lacan's and Kojve's concepts of desire and criticizes post-structuralist ideas of Deleuze, Guattari and Lyotard, particularly the concept of unconditional and unlimited desire. The article distinguishes between the concepts of innermost and sacramental desire in order to define the boundaries of the "desiring production". This distinction is applied in the analysis of "Solaris" by S. Lem and "Stalker" by Tarkovsky.

THE BOY APPEARING (AS) THE SISTER: GENDER AND SILENCE IN GEORG TRAKL*

ABSTRACTThe present text is concerned with figures of unusual gender in two poetic texts by Georg Trakl, namely ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ and ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, each of which features the same violation of German grammar at a crucial point. The first text starts and ends with a scene of a boy recognising his sister's image in the mirror, which will be read as a specular identification that transgresses the norms of gender assignment. This transgression will be further illuminated by Lee Edelman's No Future, a text that analyses the need of the heterosexual family to reproduce itself unchanged, and Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage which discusses specular identification as a prerequisite for the possibility of speech. In reading ‘Ruh und Schweigen’, the issue of silence, which is both thematised and performed by the poem, will come to the forefront. The bi‐gender figure appearing in the last lines will be understood as being dependent on this silence to appear, contrasting the way the protagonist of ‘Traum und Umnachtung’ is silenced by his family. Both these figures will therefore be read as transgressing against related, though not identical, norms of gender in ways that can only be expressed in a poetical language.

Messianic Failure: Angolan Literature, Magical Realism, and the Form of Critique

This article reads the turn toward the fantastic and the supernatural in postindependence Angolan literature as a critical registration of the trajectory of neoliberal politics in the country. After positing a homology between the corruption of "ideal-type" realism in 1960s Latin America and similar experiments in post-independence Angola, I argue that the fiction of Ndalu de Almeida (Ondjaki) should be understood as a continuation of the social commitment of earlier Angolan writers, as it deploys a set of non-realist aesthetic devices in order to challenge the entrenchment of political orthodoxies in the post-socialist Angolan state. To this end, I offer a reading of Ondjaki's 2012 novel Os Transparentes, which marks a rupture in the author's own intellectual development while also dovetailing with the recent wave of anti-governmental protests in Angola. Although the central fantastical motif of the novel—a man who is in the process of becoming transparent—has been read by critics as a critique of social inequality and kleptocratic governance, I suggest that it should rather be understood as an ambivalent registration of the encroaching feelings of disillusionment precipitated by the onset of Angola's neoliberal era. With reference to Jacques Lacan's concept of "the act," I read this ambivalence as a specifically ethical dilemma and draw attention to problems of communication and narrative in radical political movements.

The Crises of Oedipus

This article describes the various crises of the Oedipus complex. In the beginning, I address the crisis of the first traumatic days when Oedipus was to be abandoned in the wilderness. This early breakdown takes place at what may be denoted as stage zero. During this first crisis, the defensive solution is an act of doubling, according to Quinodoz's dédoublement of the parental pair, accompanied by the defenses of splitting, foreclosure, and annihilation. Protected by these defenses, the child would be able to search for a solution to the neurotic part of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud's and Lacan's conception, these phases encompass the stages of the imaginary omnipotence, of the symbolic prohibition, and the symbolic reconciliation. The second crisis of Oedipus signifies therefore that the desire encounters the prohibition of the third (e.g., the father). I will show these stages in the 1967 film adaptation of Oedipus Rex and the life of its director, Pierre Paolo Pasolini. Against this background, the third crisis of Oedipus is considered: the impending ecological catastrophe.

The “Poetic Justice” Done by Hardy to Nature in The Woodlanders

In the diegesis of Hardy’s novels, the symbolic appropriation of nature is manifest: it is brutal, mortifying. Tragedy often results from a linguistic “error” that conflates bodies and tropes – a deadly confusion between nature and culture. In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess’s “corporeal blight”, which many Victorians viewed as a moral “fault”, ceases to be a metaphor when it turns into “sticky blights” making real stains on her skin. The sexual act taking place in the forest of the Chase is a form of writing on Tess’s body. Nature here is impregnated by culture. The novel ends with the triumph of the sign: the phallic tall staff, the “black flag” fixed on the tower of the Wintoncester prison, is a writing on the sky which indicates that Tess has been hanged. But Hardy’s poetic texts, whether they be poems or fiction, operate differently. This essay will try to argue that they take us beyond the Symbolic, “beyond the printed page”, to the Real, perhaps to “nature” itself. “Stepping over language” is conceivable in the perspective opened by the Lacanian concept of “lalangue” (“llanguage”), which does not reduce language to its signifying function. This essay will focus on the issue of the textual voice and will ask the following question: whose voice is it that we hear as we read the (silent) text? Do the famous assertions by Deleuze and Guattari on “becoming-animal” through literature seem relevant to Hardy? Could we see “llanguage” as operating a kind of reversal which cancels the symbolic appropriation of nature manifest in the diegesis, thus achieving some kind of “poetic justice” through the text?