Lacanian Concept Research Articles

Gary Snyder and the Nature of Nature

This paper suggests an interpretation of Snyder's 'nature' poetry or poetics of 'wildness' that foregrounds the interplay of virtual image and real essence, since the truly 'wild' or genuinely 'natural' cannot, after all, be represented: it can only be caught in the brushstroke of the real-virtual interplay or difference. This interpretation foregrounds Lao Tzu's zi-ran (nature, self-so-ness, spontaneity) — especially as we get it in Tao Te Ching 25, where it is mentioned that Tao fa zi-ran, 'Tao/Dao follows (is conditioned by and modelled on) zi-ran'. This interpretation equally foregrounds Zen Buddhist (non-)duality or interplay of (virtual) form and (real) emptiness, and particularly emphasizes Lacan's concept of the (unrepresentable) Real. The context of this Real is a desire (taken here as Lao Tzu's spontaneous self-reversal or self-return) that has only itself as object, a desire that only reproduces itself and thus is essentially a 'lack' (manque). The author is hence suggesting that we see Snyder's ecopoetic (non-)duality of representation-as-form and represented-as-object as an interplay between an empty desire-as-representation and an empty desire-as-represented, or between the nature of nature and the nature of nature.

Heeding the stains: Lacan and organizational change

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to add to current discussions on the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis in organizational change. Specifically, It argues that critiques of Lacan's work must be acknowledged and incorporated into these discussions. To date, there remains a silence surrounding these critiques within organization studies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the existing studies that draw upon Lacan's work in the context of organizational change initiatives. It highlights the value of this theory. Next, it outlines critiques of Lacan's concepts of phallus and incest taboo, and show how these concepts can be exclusionary.FindingsThe paper finds that there remains little debate within organization studies around such critiques. Lacan tends to be employed in ways that risk reproducing particular, exclusionary aspects of his theory. A homophobic and patriarchal legacy persists in appropriations of his writing. It outlines alternative ways of reading Lacan, which aim to avoid such exclusions. It shows how introducing such alternatives is a difficult project, first, given the silence surrounding critiques of Lacan in the organizational change literature. Second, following Foucault, It argues that language has power: a patriarchal schema is self‐reinforcing in its persistence within a particular discipline, and thus difficult to dislodge.Research limitations/implicationsGiven these findings, the paper concludes that organization theorists and practitioners ought to engage with critiques of Lacan's work, when employing it in their own. The silence surrounding such legacies is dangerous. It argues that the first step in engaging with Lacan's work should be to give voice to such critiques, if his writing is to be employed in the practice and study of organizational change.Originality/valueThis paper provides a unique engagement with Lacan's work in the context of the study and practice of organizational change interventions. It presents an evaluation of well‐known critiques and useful recommendations for theorists and practitioners considering a Lacanian approach to this area of management studies.

On the Matter of Language: The Creation of the World from Letters and Jacques Lacan's Perception of Letters as Real

AbstractJewish texts from Late Antiquity, as well as culturally affiliated sources, contain three different traditions about the creation of the world from alphabetic letters. This observation, which contradicts the common assumption that the myth of creation from letters stems from the holiness of the Jewish language, calls for comparative study. A structural approach to the letter as a founding ontological element is corroborated by the ancient Greek word stoicheion (στoιχειoν), which refers to both physical foundations and alphabetic letters. To analyze this attitude to the letter in the ancient world, I draw on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, which addresses the question of the letter in the framework of human discourse. I use Lacan's concepts to describe and illuminate the inherent connection between letters and the very foundations of the world.

A letra e a imagem: Gary Hill, videoarte e psicanálise

O artigo examina as relações entre imagem e linguagem, privilegiando o conceito de letra em Jacques Lacan. São tecidas considerações sobre esta articulação no sonho e na videoarte, examinando-se particularmente dois trabalhos do artista americano Gary Hill: Around and About (1980) e Ura Aru (1985-86). Defende-se a existência de dois pólos de incidência da letra: aquele de um encontro com a imagem e aquele de uma forte tensão em relação à imagem. Este último pode levar a uma quebra do funcionamento especular em prol de uma espécie de reviramento do imaginário, deixando entrever o que chamamos de "avesso do imaginário". Nesta virada, surge o sujeito em sua condição utópica, pois sem lugar e remetido a um devir imprevisível.

O funcionamento da linguagem na esquizofrenia: um estudo lacaniano

Visando caracterizar a especificidade do funcionamento da linguagem na esquizofrenia, serão feitos mapeamento e análise de elementos teórico-clínicos encontrados em textos de Freud e Lacan. O fio condutor dessa investigação se baseará em noções freudianas de 1915 sobre "a palavra como coisa" e a "linguagem de órgão", bem como a concepção lacaniana de 1954 sobre "o simbólico como real" e a idéia dos anos 1970 sobre a exterioridade do esquizofrênico em relação ao laço social. Tais elementos serão exemplificados com vinhetas clínicas e o relato do esquizofrênico Louis Wolfson.

Lacan's Concept of Desire and its Vicissitudes

This paper counterbalances Lacan's dictum that desire is structured like a signifying chain by highlighting his dependence on a biological understanding of the sexual drive. Reiterating (and reinterpreting) Freud's "leaning on"--hypothesis about the genesis of desire, Lacan maintains that the sexual drive originates in the vital function. His ideas about male and female sexuality most clearly presuppose a biological understanding of the sexual drive. At various times, Lacan blurs the lines of his own conceptual difference between phallus and penis, up to the point of reducing the difference between the sexes to an opposition.

Tactical reading: the ideology of form in David Antin's ‘Novel Poem’

Postmodern procedural poetry has received quite a bit of attention in the last several years. In her book Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (2004), Marjorie Perloff devotes a chapter to the ...

L’eau du bain et le bébé. Sur la conception lacanienne des psychoses

The present text is a commentary of the paper about Lacanian conception of psychoses. The text examines three groups of criticism. On the reproach that the Lacanian conception implies a binary logic sustaining the idea of incurability of psychoses, the author considers that the Lacanian model proposes a structural point of view, which needs to be completed by the other Freudian points of view (topics, dynamic, genetic and economic). On the reproach that this conception leads to the exclusion of madness from society, he remarks that the study of counter-transference when working with psychotic patients is more able to explain the difficulties they face for community insertion and rehabilitation. On the reproach that this theory induces a practice that recommends to act in upon the reality of psychotic patients as the mere possibility of therapeutic action, he highlights that working with psychotics always needs a therapeutic acting in, and this statement means that psychiatry and psychoanalysis have to seek for a theory of acting in. In conclusion, the author considers that the Lacanian conception proposes an anthropological point of view that specifies the human psychic word; this point of view is maybe a radical one, but it does not lack arguments.

Fantasmatic Transactions: On the Persistence of Apartheid Ideology

Apartheid ideology presents traditional historiography with a series of conundrums: the difficulty of separating historical from subjective agency; the paradoxical status of ideologues who both author ideology and are nonetheless also subject to the spread of its ideas; the issues of the non-material benefits that appear to drive its ideological system. Taking as its starting point J.M. Coetzee's reflections on these issues, this paper builds on his promising intuition of the notion of “fantasmatic rewards” as a crucial explanatory element in understanding the “mind of apartheid”. Crucial in this respect are a number of Lacanian concepts (desire, the Other, fantasy, objet petit a, alienation and separation). Recourse to these notions enables us to provide a series of responses to the above dilemmas of apartheid ideology. Such concepts, moreover, arguably do greater conceptual justice to the inter-implication of the Other and the subject, that is, to the inter-implication of the trans-subjective socio-historical substance and unconscious subjectivity.

Toward a Theoretical Outline of the Subject

This essay draws on Adorno's concept of the non-identical in conjunction with Lacan's concept of the Real to propose a “theoretical outline of the subject” as central for feminist political theorizing. A theoretical outline of the subject recognizes the limits of theorizing, the moment where meaning fails and we are confronted with the impossibility to fully grasp the subject. At the same time, it insists on the importance of a coherent (if not whole) subject through which to effect transformations in the sociopolitical sphere. Since the non-identical is more grounded in the material world than the Real, and the Real allows us more than the non-identical to grasp the anxieties and desires that lead to totalizing theories, it is a complementary Adornian-Lacanian theoretical framework that holds a central promise for feminist political theorizing.

O estatuto do objeto na psicanálise lacaniana: uma comparação com o objeto da ciência

O artigo visa pensar a especificidade do conceito lacaniano de objeto a, distinguindo-o do objeto tal como é construído pelas ciências experimentais. Ao mesmo tempo, seguindo as indicações de Lacan de que o a seria uma metáfora do objeto de conhecimento, busca-se o sentido em que o objeto da psicanálise e o objeto da ciência poderiam ser aproximados. A conclusão é que seu traço em comum é a propriedade de invariabilidade. O caráter de invariabilidade do a será considerado em uma dupla acepção: como causa de desejo e como mais-gozar, na tentativa de encontrar uma dimensão em que ambas se articulem.

A remainder that spoils the ear

This paper explores the potentialities opened by the Lacanian concept of voice as object in the study of literary texts: is not the literary voice, by definition, silent, since we hear it with our eyes? Through examples taken among modernist writers, we shall see different modalities of voice: how, in a chapter of Ulysses dedicated to the ear, “Sirens”, Joyce puts the Other’s discourse and its excess of significance to silence, through a particular binding of voice to letter. Katherine Mansfield’s stories centre on an epiphanic moment of suspension which always ends in a trickle of voice uttering the impossibility of finding a signifier for femininity. In Conrad, the ‘acousmatic’ voice is indissolubly associated with a spot of time, a blind spot in the picture which betrays the authority of established models or ideals. Voice, then, is more than ever what is at stake in modernity insofar as its presence foregrounds epistemological uncertainty and the lack of guarantee in human utterances. It is most often the vehicle for recording and transmitting affects like anxiety, joy, bliss, horror which can be the hallmark of a writer’s style.

Tess’s silent cry

How far can the lacanian concept of the vocal object help us read a novel by Thomas Hardy and bring to light its modernity? In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the motif of the stain (or spot) has a vocal quality: the vermilion words painted on the wall “shout themselves out”, something is shown in the field of the gaze in lieu of the voice. Thus Tess’s voice is hardly ever heard, her lament is never vocalized, it seems to be stuck in her throat. By making reference to Slavoj Zizek’s analysis of Munch’s painting, The Scream, I intend to show how the concepts of ‘voice qua object’ and ‘gaze qua object’ throw a light on the enigmatic question of voice in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and thus appear relevant to literary studies. In normal life, the consistency of our experience of reality depends on the exclusion of the objet petit a from it. What happens in Tess’s tragic world is that the ‘object small a’ has somehow got stuck in her reality, it has not been fully repressed and excluded. Tess occupies a borderline position in which the horror of the object is very nearly encountered. Tess will have to be hanged so that her voice may no longer be a threat, for the question involved is that of feminine jouissance, the dangerous enjoyment ‘beyond the phallus’ which has to be suppressed if phallic order is to prevail.

Between Image and Identity. Transnational Fantasy, Symbolic Violence, and Feminist Misrecognition by Karina Eileraas (review)

Book Reviews1 6 1 langue sans se rendre compte qu'elles secondent ainsi ce qu'elles entendent détruire. Que de femmes auteurs, d'écrivains femmes, etc ! Femmes et livres est un must pour celles et ceux qui s'interrogent sur le genre et l'écriture, le genre et les livres dans tous les domaines du savoir. Thérèse Moreau Eileraas, Karina. Between Image and Identity. Transnational Fantasy, Symbolic Violence, and Feminist Misrecognition. United Kingdom: Lexington books, 2007. Pp 175. ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-1812-2. Working with Mohanty's critiques of Western feminist representations of third world women and their often ethnocentric reductionism, Karine Eileraas explores how post-colonial women writers from the Maghreb and South East Asia challenge and subvert the process of objedification, always present in colonial discourse. To that end, the author chose to work from and with semiautobiographical literature, as well as visual and performance art. The works studied include Seila Sebbar, Assia Djebar and Theresa Cha, but also Duras and Wang among others, all transnational subjectivities occupying the borderlands in between nations due to war and colonization. Eileraas, engaging with a plethora of postcolonial critiques such as Fanon and Deleuze as well as Rey Chow and Chandra Mohanty, demonstrates and analyzes new visions of transnational trauma through questioning, in particular, the authorship of an image. The whole analysis promotes a paradigmatic shift in the formulation of difference, agency and representation, suggesting how one might exist in critical relationship to the Orientalist depictions. The book is mainly divided into four chapters, themselves divided in smaller sections, which make this dense demonstration enjoyable reading. Chapter one constitutes several brief encounters with Fanon, Barthes, Lacan and Chow, presenting key theoretical concepts that frame Eileraas's theory interweaving image, identity andfantasy. She then applies her analysis to works by Marguerite Duras and David Henry Wang. This chapter supplements the introduction in setting the theoretical scene for the forthcoming analyses developed in the following chapters. Chapter two makes a thought-provoking parallel between Algerian women, forcedly unveiled to produce identity card in colonized Algeria, and Sherazade, Sebbar's heroin of the novel bearing the same name. Based on a remake of an earlier article, the chapter develops the idea of how subaltern women's oppositional looks or demeanor resist the colonizing gaze, and thus permit the creation of a counter-fiction of female sexuality and national identity, contesting the colonial fantasies of otherness. Chapter three examines further how images in Cha's Dictée (1982) and Chronology (1977) and in Cixous's essay Rootprint (1997) create an (illusory) effect of self identity as a response to the nationalist and colonialist politics of 1 62Women in French Studies representation. The family albums, present in both works, are full of omissions, ruptures and repetitions reflecting the profound suspicion of origins and illustrating the Lacanian concept of "méconnaissance" or misrecognition. This chapter also gives us a chance to revisit the extraordinary work of the belated Cha, whose linguistic experiments and double-entendre symbolize an ex-and a(p)-propriation ofthe French colonial tongue. Chapter four is devoted to Assia Djebar, whose characters subvert the colonizing gaze by using their own fantasies in creating counter-memories of Algerian history and female sexuality in order "to dismember" the very conditions of possibility of this gaze. This feminist symbolic economy is reminiscent ofDeleuze's The logic ofsense (1990) on cinema and his concept of "unfounding" or effondement. Eileraas uses his concept as well as its legal meaning, referring to the term "unfounded claim" generally used in rape or sexual assault charges, thus devaluating and silencing the female voice. Both notions help to explain how Djebar stages the "unfounding" of nationalist and Orientalist historiography. The intersection of a great number of references regarding nationalism, transnational studies, sexuality, colonization, autobiography and visual culture could be daunting to the reader. The consistency and coherence of the volume reside in the formulation of the paradigm shift, true in each chapter. First, that the visual can embody a form of violence, the exotically conceived violence of representation, and in particular the representation of difference. Eileraas further posits that postcolonial feminist artists can participate in this violence, at...

Uma discussão sobre a angústia em Jacques Lacan: um contraponto com Freud

Em um primeiro momento este trabalho elucida a concepção de angústia no Seminário Livro 10: A angústia de Jacques Lacan. Depois de tal percurso, busca-se comparar a noção da angústia como um afeto que não é sem objeto com a leitura freudiana de tal conceito. Finalmente, demonstra-se que é justamente esta concepção lacaniana de angústia que permite encontrar a noção de gozo e de desejo no objeto da angústia. As coordenadas para articular o desejo e o gozo convergem para a transmissão de gozo sendo anterior ao significante. Para demonstrar tal hipótese o autor propõe uma releitura do caso Hans de Freud.

On Lacan and the `Becoming-ness' of Organizations/Selves

Poststructuralist accounts of organizations understand them as flows, as verbs in process of always-becoming. Subjects who work `in' organizations are similarly always in a process of becoming. Organization and members are mutually constitutive, each enfolded within the other. The process by which each is enfolded within and constituted by the other is what is explored in this essai. Its aim is to analyse something of the becoming-ness of organizations/selves, in which the researcher-self is imbricated in this becoming-ness and must therefore be part of that which is studied. To achieve this aim I draw on Lacan's concepts: of the mirror stage, or how I am in an agonistic relationship with the other; Nachträglichkeit or the reliving of the past in the present (deferred action); and identification. I apply these concepts to an interview I, an academic, carried out with a manager, emphasizing the importance of these organizational identities in our encounter with each other. The conclusion I reach is that the organization I am `in' is at the same time `in' me: there is no inside and no outside.

Between Satire and Suture: Some Aspects of White Writing in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Since 1994, whites in South Africa have been trying to accommodate themselves to their newly acquired status as minoritarian. In the process, the initial attitude of political correctness vis-à-vis the black majority has given way to a more critical stance, which is evidenced by the spate of satirical writings that have emerged in South Africa in recent years. However, exposing the iniquities of the new order is one thing, but it would appear that in some instances, given satire's penchant for invective from a moral high ground, the critique of the way things are is not only motivated by the genuine concern for the well-being of the country but has become infused with a sense of racial superiority. This is counteracted in some instances, however, by the attempt on the part of the authors to somehow find their place in the new order, the psychoanalytical aspects of which can be best explained by drawing on the Lacanian concept of suture. Journal for the Study of Religion Vol. 19 (2) 2006: pp. 99-113

Sarduy avec Lacan: The Portrayal of French Psychoanalysis in Cobra and La simulación

campy women; the other, severe French intellectual famous for his extraordinarily complex psychoanalytic writings. Sarduy was born to humble family in the provincial town of Camaguey; Lacan, to an elegant couple of haute bourgeois Parisians. One was known for drinking cocktails at the Cafe de Flore, on Saint Germain des Pres; the other for teaching seminars on castration, transference, and the phallus at the university. One published novels with titles like Pajaros de L· play a; the other, academic articles devoted to The gaze as objet petit a and The function of the Ί.' Could these two writers have anything in common? Despite their extremely different styles, Sarduy and Lacan crossed paths several times during the height of Structuralism, and they influenced each other's work. As I will argue in this essay, Sarduy developed serious dialogue with Lacan and his psychoanalytic concepts in his novels and essays. Although most scholarship on Severo Sarduy mentions the fact that he was an avid reader of Jacques Lacan (see, for example, the texts by Montero, Gonzalez Echevarria, and Marquez) , no one has provided detailed account of how the Cuban novelist read and transformed the work of the French analyst. In this essay I propose to undertake such project by focusing on two works, novel and an essay: Cobra (1971) and La simulacion (1981). After identifying the key allusions to Lacan and Lacanian concepts in these two works, I will argue that Sarduy was one of the most original readers of the French analyst, because his work proposes radical, new model for interpreting many of the analyst's theoretical formulations. Severo Sarduy arrived in Paris in 1960 after receiving scholarship from the newly formed Cuban government to study at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris. Shortly after his arrival, he met the man who would be his lover for the rest of his life: Francois Wahl, an editor at the French publishing house Editions du Seuil, who introduced Sarduy to the stars of Parisian intellectual life in the 1960s, including Roland Barthes, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and other members of

La voix étranglée de Tess

In Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the motif of the stain (or spot) has a vocal quality : the vermilion words painted on the wall « shout themselves out », something is shown in the field of the gaze in lieu of the voice. Thus Tess’s voice is hardly ever heard, her lament is never vocalized, it seems to be stuck in her throat. Instead we see the « round little hole » of her mouth when Angel rejects her, or we read innumerable « O’s » on the page when she speaks. The lacanian concepts of « voice qua object » and « gaze qua object » (which are two forms of objet petit a) can throw a light on this interconnection of gaze and voice, and thereby show the modernity of Hardy’s novel.For Slavoj Žižek has argued that the « passion for the Real » was the distinctive feature of the 20th century. In normal life, the consistency of our experience of reality depends on the exclusion of objet petit a from it. What happens in Tess’s tragic world is that the object small a has somehow got stuck in her reality, it has not been fully repressed and excluded. Tess occupies a border-line position (which is tragic, not psychotic) in which the horror of the gaze qua object and the horror of the voice qua object, that is to say the horror of the Thing, are very nearly encountered, being almost unveiled and audible. Thus Tess’s throttled voice is a threat, a silent cry that will finally be silenced when she is hanged. It is a symptom of the passion for the Real, and evidence of Hardy’s modernity.

Persuasão antes que convencimento: apontamentos sobre Wittgenstein e a psicanálise

As relações que Wittgenstein mantém com o pensamento de Freud, como atestaram vários estudiosos, são marcadamente ambíguas: existe, por um lado, uma crítica acerba do caráter pseudocientífico com que a psicanálise apresenta supostas "descobertas empíricas", e do fascínio exercido por este modo de proceder; mas há, por outro lado, evidências da sua admiração pelo efeito dissolvente do uso de metáforas e interpretações, chegando mesmo Wittgenstein a incorporar essa estratégia ao seu próprio método de investigação lógica dos conceitos filosóficos. Neste trabalho pretendo retirar de uma reflexão acerca do método incorporado às Investigações Filosóficas, comparável em muitos aspectos à clínica de uma psicanálise lingüística dessubstancializada, alguns pontos positivos que se poderiam acrescentar à crítica da concepção de linguagem de Lacan.