Lacan's Seminar Research Articles

Anxiety, Desire, and the Object a: Lacan on Lucia Tower's "Countertransference".

Lacan's seminars are a treasure trove of innovative psychoanalytic explorations. In Seminar X, Anxiety, he takes up this Freudian theme and explores a number of interrelated ideas: castration, the difference between the sexes, two different forms of acting out, and what he terms his only original theoretical contribution: the object a and its "various incidences." The object a is described here in detail, especially in relation to Lacan's argument that analysts who are women have a freer relationship to their desire and the countertransferences it spawns than do men. Lacan discussed Lucia Tower's classic paper, "Countertransference," in light of these notions. This essay is a close reading of Lacan's close reading of Tower, whose account, he says, must be approached in all its "innocence and freshness."

Contributors

Other| October 01 2021 Contributors Pedagogy (2021) 21 (3): 565–567. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-9137158 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 October 2021; 21 (3): 565–567. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-9137158 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she... Issue Section: Contributors You do not currently have access to this content.

Rod i ime: ka mišljenju mogućeg u delu Džudit Batler i Silvena Lazarisa

Judith Butler analyzes the concepts of name and naming in clear opposition to psychoanalytic theory, as well as structuralist anthropology, in which, starting from the experience of the lesbian position in Willa Cather's prose, she recognizes and exposes patrilineal model of thinking and naming. This line of thought will be shown critique of Sigmund Freud's critical studies regarding the status of the body and erogenity, the dialectic of having and being a phallus in the early phase of Jacques Lacan's work, and examining the question of the imaginary or symbolic status of the phallus in Lacan's work. However, starting from Miller's (Jacques-Alain Miller) reading of Lacan's seminar L'envers de la psychanalyse, in the section "Father's Names," we will reconstruct a radical break in the theory of the late Lacan, both in relation to Freud, but also regarding his own position from the early phases and point to the understanding of names as a place of convergence of the late psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Judith Butler. This will be followed by a discussion of the same problem (names) in the work of the French anthropologist Sylvain Lazarus in an attempt to show how the discussion of this problem can be understood homologously with Butler's reading of Willa Cather's prose. In the following part, we will try to show how late Lacan's theory and Lazarus's Anthropology of the name can provide a fruitful framework for a theoretical dialogue with Judith Butler and a re-examination of traditional conceptions of language and naming.

The racial lens of Dylann Roof: racial anxiety and white nationalist rhetoric on new media

ABSTRACT This essay claims that white nationalism is a political identity animated by the affect of racial anxiety. Drawing from Frantz Fanon's work on blackness as a phobic object, Hortense J. Spillers's conception of the flesh/body distinction, and Jacques Lacan's seminar on anxiety, the essay argues that the racial anxiety of the white nationalist subject emerges from encounters with the incapacity of post-racial fantasies of national wholeness to fully disavow the abjection of blackness that holds together the symbolic structure of race. The essay performs a rhetorical analysis of Dylann Storm Roof's manifesto “rtf88,” claiming that Roof's racial anxiety is anchored by an identification with the trope of “racial awareness” as an abject metaphor for his sovereignty. The essay uses this trope to trace three different relationships to racial anxiety that the white nationalist subject articulates on new media: discovery, mapping, and mobilization. The essay concludes by outlining future directions for scholars of race and media who wish to study white nationalism on the internet.

Plus d'une loi: Reading Repetition Compulsion and Generalized Fetishism with Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida

Plus d'une loiReading Repetition Compulsion and Generalized Fetishism with Deleuze-Guattari and Derrida Elias Jabre (bio) Translated by Thomas Clément Mercier La psychanalyse devrait obliger à repenser beaucoup d'assurances, par exemple à reconstruire toute l'axiomatique du droit, de la morale, des "droits de l'homme," tout le discours construit sur l'instance du moi, de la responsabilité consciente, la rhétorique politicienne, le concept de torture, la psychiatrie légale et son système, etc. Non pour renoncer aux affirmations éthiques ou politiques, au contraire, pour leur avenir même. Cela ne se fait ni dans la société psychanalytique ni dans la société tout court, en tout cas pas assez, pas assez vite. Voilà peut-être une tâche pour la pensée. Nous vivons tous, à cet égard, dans une dissociation quotidienne, terrifiante et comique à la fois, notre lot historique le plus singulier … —Jacques Derrida, Le nouvel Observateur (1983)1 Since its inception, psychoanalytic theory has attempted to rethink what puts the "subject" in motion by theorizing a force of repetition which exceeds representation: the Oedipal law. Therefore, it might seem counterintuitive to resort to psychoanalysis in order to consider the modalities of social and political change. Shouldn't we assume that this law, because it is described as a force of repetition, is by necessity a conservative force, and that it results in defining social movements in the form of a process of reproduction? It is true that psychoanalysis also strived to account for phenomena of transgression; but transgression was also related to a force of repetition: the death drive or the repetition compulsion following Freud's "speculation" in Beyond the pleasure principle. [End Page 15] Interpretations of the death drive have been multiple and sometimes contradictory: the death drive has been interpreted as the result of a mis-incorporation of the Oedipal law; as a violent traumatism that exceeds the law of conservation; or as a compelling desire that exceeds any law. The death drive manifests itself in the form of a morbid jouissance, compelling the neurotic subject to repeat symptoms that make him or her suffer. Repetition compulsion thus signifies the insistence of the law, which enjoins the subject to return to the law and to find his or her place in relation to the law. Such insistence is also the process through which the subject can reconfigure his or her own place before the law in the context of the psychoanalytic cure. In this way, Lacan translated the Oedipal law into a language-structure: in his book Lacan avec Derrida, René Major explains that the truth of Lacan's Seminar on The Purloined Letter, given in 1955, is to "establish the insistence of the chain of signifiers—that is, the principle of the repetition automatism—which guides the most determining effects for the subject" (2001, 56). Thus, the work of the analyst consists in helping the subject to find their place before the Oedipal law by untangling their neuroses, and by curing correlated symptoms. In this perspective, and to this purpose, a certain Freudo-Lacanian orthodoxy supposes the dissociation between psychoanalysis and the field of politics, so that the patient does not get hampered by what Lacan calls in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis "the service of goods" [le service des biens] (1986, 34). Without necessarily justifying the existing political order, the psychoanalytic doxa tends to legitimize said order by withdrawing from it in the name of a higher ethics. Let alone the fact that many psychoanalysts use the constant reference to Civilization and Its Discontents, as a way to disqualify the mirages and illusions of revolutions and to emphasize the indestructible aggressiveness of human nature. According to Freud, all cultures and civilizations are by necessity built against the death drive, and necessitate a certain renunciation of the drives. However, despite the apparent conservatism of repetition compulsion, philosophers such as Deleuze and Guattari and Derrida [End Page 16] turned to repetition compulsion in order to reformulate libidinal economy in view of offering new perspectives for political transformation. For Deleuze and Guattari, as well as for Derrida, this political reformulation of repetition compulsion also involves a reinterpretation of the psychoanalytic...

Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar

Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar

A Joycean Interface: Re-Territorializing between Deleuze and Lacan

This article argues that aspects of Jacques Lacan's late seminar on James Joyce supplements his failed attempt to work with Gilles Deleuze. Lacan's Seminar XXIII (1975–76) was presented shortly after the publication of Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1972), and he asserts that Joyce's use of language, particularly in Finnegans Wake (1939), exemplifies how creative and potentially psychotic self-naming can operate as an Oedipal traversal, transforming the symptom into what Lacan terms the sinthome. This article argues that Lacan's theory of the sinthome significantly reconfigures his prior psychoanalytic frameworks due to engagement with concepts found in Anti-Oedipus. Critically fortifying this correlation provides the means for etching out a theoretical intersection between Deleuze, Guattari, and Lacan, and it consequently provides an innovative interpretation of Lacan's late work.

Moral Experience and the Unconscious

Moral Experience and the Unconscious Steven Groarke In a fascinating paper, where the stakes are a good deal higher than the modesty of its tone might suggest, Edward Harcourt requires us to think again about the ethics of psychoanalysis. We should not allow ourselves to be misled by Harcourt's tendency to downplay the ambitious reach of his argument. Indeed, Lacan demonstrated what is at stake here by drawing attention to the "originality of the Freudian position in ethical matters" (1986/1992, p. 11). Lacan may be relied on, more obviously than anyone else I can think of in the Freudian field, as a counterweight to the assimilation of psychoanalysis to moral philosophy. A stenographer began to transcribe Lacan's seminars starting in 1952 and, reflecting on matters some 20 years later, Lacan claimed that "of all the seminars that someone else is going to bring out, [L'éthique de la psychanalyse (1959–1960)] is perhaps the only one I will rewrite myself and make into a written text" (1975/1998, p. 53). Clearly, Lacan considered the seminar important enough to warrant special attention and, in my view, it is one of the most significant psychoanalytical and philosophical works on ethics in the Freudian tradition, a counterpart, as Certeau (1986, p. 60) points out, to Freud's masterwork on religious history in Moses and Monotheism. It is not surprising that Harcourt makes no mention of Lacan or L'éthique in an otherwise wide-ranging and eclectic paper. Unlike Harcourt, Lacan did not view the ethics of psychoanalysis of a piece with Aristotelian ethics, or with a style of ethical theory based on notions of arete, right habits, and a rational conception of the life of eudaimonia in which the good for human beings can be identified with reference to the nature of human experience. More pointedly, psychoanalysis on Lacan's reckoning is not a type of education in the excellence of character, and he certainly did not think that analysts needed a better theory of maturity. Rather, taking his bearings toward the real from Freud, he privileged the discipline of Ananke or necessity over the ends of virtue. As opposed to the defining continuities in Harcourt's argument regarding classical and psychoanalytic ethics, Lacan (1986/1992, p. 11) emphasized "the interval between Aristotle and Freud." On this view, which is one that I share, the Freudian interpretation may be counted as an ethical event, precisely, to the extent that the 'interval' provides an opening over against the tradition. As far as I know, the vast majority of moral philosophers have shown little or no interest in psychoanalysis, although among those philosophers who have engaged seriously with psychoanalytic theory, John Cottingham (1998) is notable for allowing that the Freudian concept of the unconscious has profound implications for the ethical task of determining the conditions of human fulfillment. If, as Cottingham (1998, p. 140) argues, "we take the central problem of moral philosophy to be that of how we should live our lives to the full…then psychoanalytic theory uncovers a fundamental flaw in the idea that we can reach that [End Page 137] goal by the application of a rationally laid plan." Lionel Trilling (1951) spoke in the same vein for variousness and possibility, for the potentialities of life, against a narrowing of mind modeled on the use we make of it in everyday, organizational tasks. The same holds for Cottingham as for Trilling and Lacan: psychoanalysis announces and inaugurates a new discourse on the human predicament. And developing requisite habits of virtue on the Aristotelian model of ethics, for instance, does not meet the fundamental Freudian challenge that there is something in the human psyche, an irreducible tendency to self-disruption (Lear, 2000), which repeatedly resists the principle of reason. Lacan (1973/1977, p. 33) insisted more vociferously, perhaps, than anyone else that the "status of the unconscious … is ethical." Nevertheless, he maintained that the logic of the unconscious cannot be stated in the vocabulary of traditional moral philosophy. Although the moral philosopher, at best, aims at finding ways in which we can rationally agree about what matters, the unconscious is precisely that about which we want to know...

O desejo e a aprendizagem da leitura e da escrita

Resumo: O desejo e a aprendizagem do ato de ler e escrever são analisados neste texto a partir da logica psicanalítica, fundada por Freud e atualizada por Lacan. A escola e a família demandam uma mudança de posição da criança para uma nova perspectiva de existência como sujeito da aprendizagem. A torção necessária para esta mudança é tratada nos Seminários de Jacques Lacan e permite refletir sobre a questão da criança escolar que é desafiada a romper com o imaginário e lançar-se à existência simbólica no mundo da linguagem falada e escrita.

Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis by Daniel Bristow

Reviewed by: Joyce and Lacan: Reading, Writing, and Psychoanalysis by Daniel Bristow Luke Thurston (bio) JOYCE AND LACAN: READING, WRITING, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS, by Daniel Bristow. New York: Routledge Publishers, 2017. x + 190 pp. $135.20 cloth; $126.82 paper. This book begins, rather surprisingly in my view, by laying its Lacanian cards quite openly on the table: it is simply unabashed about the and which supposedly links the two famous names on its cover. It has no time, in other words, for all those critical and philosophical quibbles about the legitimacy of moving imperiously between the clinical and the cultural, and simply takes that legitimacy for granted. Once that initial step has been made, we are immediately plunged into the "case" of Joyce, a case to be explored psychoanalytically, like Sigmund Freud's "Rat Man" (with the obvious difference that the latter actually underwent psychoanalysis).1 Thus the question "Was Joyce mad?" (used as a chapter title) can be asked in all seriousness, as if it counted as a genuine inquiry, though I, for one, would not know how to start making it actually mean anything. Reading this book therefore requires a huge suspension of disbelief: if one can set aside the nagging sense of the speculative absurdity of the whole Lacanian appropriation of Joyce, an appropriation endorsed and indeed developed by Bristow, then there may be reasons to carry on reading, and even things of interest to Joyceans. It is a lively and playful engagement with Lacan's late work and the often obscure contexts of that work, and Bristow garners an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, often hazarding unexpected connections. It is written with a breathless energy, a free-wheeling syntax that conveys a sense of almost evangelical excitement. An opening chapter sets out the often-told tale of Joyce's combination of interest in and hostility to psychoanalysis, noting the interactions with Carl Jung around the diagnosis of Joyce's daughter Lucia, the author's surreptitious redeployment of psychoanalytic texts in his writing, and then Lacan's notion of the sinthome, supposedly produced as a kind of solution to the enigmas of Joyce.2 Subsequent [End Page 231] chapters repeatedly return to that key notion, situating it with a range of striking diagrams within the overall field of Lacanian ideas. The book thus has much to say about the final period of Lacan's work, though the question of how relevant that work is to understanding Joyce remains uncertain. Bristow cheerfully ropes into his Lacanian knot some thinkers one feels might have been somewhat disconcerted to find themselves there, notably Jacques Derrida, who, in chapter 2, comes across as, in essence, a fairly Lacanian kind of chap. It is in one sense quite refreshing to find a writer who simply does not hesitate to make such extraordinary moves, though for anyone conversant with Derrida's work, with all its meticulous concern for the politics and ethics of the signature, again it is hard to suppress an anxious chuckle. The book is permeated with references to the latest work of Lacanians, above all of Slavoj Žižek: his colossal influence is evident on every page, from the wacky references (St. Augustine, Lord Byron, Hunter S Thompson, Red Dwarf …) to the often Yoda-like phrasing. The spirit of Žižek helps give the book its playful tone, though Bristow also pays close attention to the way the Slovenian panjandrum has chosen over the years to deploy and reinterpret the Lacanian sinthome. This is a timely reminder, in the end, of how open and "unfinished" this final phase of Lacan's work still remains and of the lack of overall consensus among psychoanalysts as to its value. Lacan's seminars in 1975-1976 were a mixture of abstruse technical reflections, addressed to practicing analysts, and creative, "wild" speculations about Joyce's "case," about his relationship with his father, about his daughter's illness, and so on. Bristow's book makes a laudable effort to sort out what may still be worth reinterpreting and developing from all this. But I think the end result of that effort, while stimulating and intriguing, is made less clear than it might be...

Perversion, Terminable and Interminable: Foucault, Lacan, and <em>DSM-5</em>

Perversion, Terminable and Interminable:Foucault, Lacan, and DSM-5 H. N. Lukes (bio) In 1992, when the so-called culture wars and intrafeminist sex wars were waning in the United States and the term "queer" was hitting both the streets and academia, Emily Apter wrote the following for an entry on "perversion" in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary: "Though certain erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse (say, lesbian sadomasochism) may continue to be classified as perverse . . . , it is none the less unclear whether gender-revisionist psychoanalysis really needs a clinical definition of perversion in its lexicon. Perhaps the term will endure most successfully as a synonym for sexual subversion."1 In this essay I discuss the curious fate of perversion, with and without its proper nomination, twenty-five years after Apter's prognosis.2 After the following general theoretical introduction, the first section charts sexual perversion through its historical synonym "paraphilia" in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) recently revised fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The second section investigates how and why contemporary psychoanalytically inclined sociopolitical theorists are using the term "perversion" with only oblique reference to sexuality. My tracing of this split genealogy of paraphilia and desexualized perversion informs [End Page 327] this essay's ultimate thesis that recent trends in the academic Left have come to sublimate the logics of sex panic as a reaction to a generalized panic endemic to neoliberal risk societies. Two decades after Apter's assessment, her reservation about the subversiveness of consensual lesbian sadomasochism sounds dated and almost quaint—but then so does her implicit faith in the ongoing significance of "gender-revisionist psychoanalysis" and the political stakes of sexual subversion itself. Psychoanalytic clinicians who have responded to feminist and queer revisionist mandates provide the exception to the rule of psychoanalysis's already diminishing clinical and cultural influence in the United States.3 Recent queer and feminist work in and outside of American universities has also demonstrated less interest in either supporting contemporary clinical psychoanalysis or returning to its canonical texts. Since the 1990s, American LGBT politics have increasingly deferred to legal apparatuses of state-based inclusion and assimilationist cultural representation, leaving the antinormative aspects of "queer" an increasingly unmoored political category. Meanwhile, sexual transgressions have taken up locations that do not easily read as social subversion or arrange themselves clearly around the former left/right-wing battle lines of the culture wars. Among these are our current era's witness to such disparate advents as the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise's popularization of straight bondage, dominance, sadism, and masochism (BDSM); a seeming proliferation of criminal sex offenders; and a renewed attention to rape culture that is currently focused on the institutional practices of colleges and universities themselves. In this context, it is conspicuous that some contemporary critical theorists have resurrected perversion to signify not the obvious "erotic practices traditionally coded as perverse" that Apter notes but rather the projected psyches and political platforms of those most wont to condemn these practices, including figures such as George W. Bush. This new application of perversion is the logical if unlikely end of a certain critical arc. After French feminism and Anglo-American film criticism had first delivered the theories of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the U.S. academy in the 1970s, Slavoj Žižek and his fellow travelers as well as new English-language translations of Lacan's seminars from the late 1980s on enabled a return to Lacan that has been more attuned to broad understandings of contemporary politics and historical materialism than to specifically feminist applications. Among these newly available concepts has been Lacan's conversion of perversion from a tendency toward specific sex practices to a fundamental psychic "structure" [End Page 328] that defines the analysand's relation to the psychoanalyst, if not also to meaning and authority as such.4 If Lacan arguably refused the naturalized link between sexual minorities and moral condemnations of perversion in the culturally and historically specific imaginary, then he also refigured the pervert less as a sexy rebel than as a desperate reactionary calling on the oedipal father to complete his unfinished work of "castration...

Enjoyment Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Antigone , Julian of Norwich, and the Use of Pleasures

In 1984 Michel Foucault published the long awaited sequel to his Histoire de la sexualite. The Use of Pleasures, as volume two was titled, ends with a final chapter called True Love, which offers a reading of Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus. In many ways, this chapter is crucial to understanding Foucault's whole project in the History of Sexuality. For one thing, it takes up and responds to Lacan's reading of the Symposium in his well-known 1961 seminar on transference and thus is central to understanding the relation between the Histoire and psychoanalysis. For Lacan, the essence of the Symposium is its exploration of the transferential relationship and the logic of substitution that relation implies between Socrates, Alcibiades, and Agathon. (1) In his reading, Alcibiades and Agathon, while not identical, are substitutable as objects of desire, insofar as each of them is beautiful. At the same time, Socrates is the object of Alcibiades' desire precisely because Alcibiades desires to be his object. Subject and object, desire and its tokens, all become part of an economy of substitution in which Agathon (literally Mr. Good) and Alcibiades (the beautiful boy par excellence) become place holders in a dance that leads from the empirical to the sublime through a logic of transference and counter-transference as all three characters play musical couches at the conclusion of Plato's great dialogue. Foucault's reading, in the end, does not so much contest Lacan's interpretation as historicize it, asking how is it that Love or Desire (Eros) came to be seen as a problem of rather than a simple question of regime or of the use of pleasures. As we shall see later, in so doing, he offers a powerful recontextualization of psychoanalysis's framing of desire in relation to the truth of the subject. But Lacan's seminar on transference was the second in a sequence devoted to texts from antiquity. The first was 1960's The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which featured an extended reading of the Antigone (1986). And while Foucault offers an important response to the problem of desire and its relation to truth, as first posited by Plato and reinterpreted by Freud and Lacan, he does not do the same for Antigone. This, as we shall see, constitutes an important lacuna: for the Antigone does not so much pose the Symposium's question of desire's relation to and to an economy of substitutions, according to Lacan, as posit the possibility of an enjoyment, of a drive, that goes beyond any such economy, beyond all calculation, and hence beyond the pleasure principle. This is a possibility the History of Sexuality does not directly consider. When at the end of Volume One Foucault asks us to imagine a world not founded on sexuality, but on bodies and pleasures (1976), he is positing a utopia that Alcibiades might well have understood but one that has no room for Antigone and her choice of death. Moreover Antigone is not a unique case in this regard, as we shall demonstrate later when we read what is many ways a sister text: the visionary writings of the medieval anchorite, Julian of Norwich. To fully understand the stakes of Foucault's final chapter of Volume Two of the History of Sexuality, however, we must also come to see how his reading offers a counterdiscourse to another famous psychoanalytic interpretation of the Symposium, one that is contemporary with his own and one that takes direct aim at what it terms his homosexual discourse, Julia Kristeva's Tales of Love. Kristeva's text not only opens with a reading of the same Platonic dialogues as Foucault but it also makes pointed allusions to Foucault's person, using phrases such as our archeologists of love and defining all homosexuality as characterized by sado-masochistic domination. Nor is this a single reference. The association of homosexuality, sado-masochism, and Foucault is repeated in more menacing and less flattering terms in Kristeva's thinly veiled portrait of the philosopher in her roman a clef, Les samourais. …

Anxious Settler Belonging: Actualising the Potential for Making Resilient Postcolonial Subjects

When I arrived in Aurukun, west Cape York, it was the heat that struck me first, knocking city pace from my body, replacing it with a languor familiar to my childhood, although hea more northern. Fieldwork brings with it its own delights and anxieties. It is where I feel competent and incompetent, where I am most indebted and thankful for the generosity kindness of strangers. I love the way “no-where” places quickly become somewhere and some to me. Then there are the bodily visitations: a much younger self haunts my body. At time adult self abandons me, leaving me nothing but an awkward adolescent: clumsy, sweaty, too m body, too white, too urban, too disconnected or unable to interpret the social rules. My body in that this is not my home, but home for Wik and Wik Way people. Flailing about unmoored from socio-cultural system that I take for granted, and take comfort from – and I draw sustena Anxiety circles, closes in on me, who grows distant and unsure, fragmented. Misusing Deborah Rose, I’m tempted to say I’m separated from my nourishing terrain. Indeed it can feel like nation (not the country) slipped out from under my feet.

Psychoanalysis at the Time of the Posthuman: Insisting on the Outside-Sense

This article ‘diagnoses’ the discourse of posthumanism as a contemporary symptom, and thus as a mode of the social link that attempts to deal with the real of the human condition as, precisely, non-natural. In order to then interpret this posthuman symptom, the article outlines the psychoanalytic notion of interpretation itself, not as the laying bare of a latent meaning, but as the inducement of truth-effects which are distinct from scientific understandings of truth premised upon identity and non-contradiction. Lacan's Seminar XVII is then utilized both as an example of the psychoanalytic interpretation of contemporary life, and as a resource for thinking through the reification of science and technological ‘lathouses’ that underpins the posthuman era. The article concludes with a strong defence of the capacity of psychoanalysis to hold open a space for the ‘outside-sense’, or what evades capture by the (scientific) signifier. It is argued that this ‘outside-sense’ is what truly constitutes the human insofar as humans are speaking beings.

A GRAMÁTICA DA PSICANÁLISE

This article is a defense of a philosophy of psychoanalysis with no interference whatever in the autonomy of the analyzed discipline. To comply with this objective, the Wittgensteinian philosophical method and its related concepts of grammar, grammatical description, and therapy, are being proposed. Such therapeutical objects of comparison are then applied to a case of use of psychoanalytic concepts in a text from Lacan's Seminar XV , to show a practical example of the kind of philosophy that we favor.

On Rational Madness: Love and Reason in Socrates and Lacan (Winner of the Taylor & Francis ICA Philosophy of Communication Division Best Paper Award 2008)

Drawing on a close reading of Lacan's Seminar XX: Encore, regarding the idea of love's centrality in every human intersubjective experience, this article explores the artificially constructed division between Eros and Logos that since the Enlightenment pervades most of the cultural renditions of western images of love, and argues that this separation forecloses an overarching unity, put forth by Lacan trough the concept Y a l'Un (there is One).

Repetition to monochrome: surfaces for picture making by Herzog & de Meuron and Ellsworth Kelly

Painting and architecture are models of thought with a number of common preoccupations, one of which is representation. In this paper I will use Jacques Lacan's seminar ‘What is a Picture?’ as my s...

Reply to Commentaries

In reply to my discussants, I take up their questions on the subjects of foolishness, the analyst's dreams, and the unnamed patient. My responses to them bring me back to my own father to ask questions that had not been asked yet about my mother's release; back to the return of my patient after years of absence, and the additional history I learned then; and back to Lacan's seminar and my Lacanian analytic training to question that approach to the treatment of madness.

A review of Lacan's seminar on anxiety

The seminar on anxiety marks a turning point in the development of Lacan's thought from several perspectives. First, Lacan implicitly abandons his theory that the unconscious is structured like a language. He also abandons the endeavour to identify Freud's theory with his own. He develops some original new ideas about anxiety, some of which are of great interest, such as the connection between castration anxiety and narcissism; others, such as his denial of the existence of separation anxiety, are absurd. Lacan's main point of divergence from Freud, his rejection of the inner world, also emerges clearly in this seminar.

A incidência real da causa na psicanálise

O artigo trata da articulação da noção de causa na psicanálise a partir do Seminário A Angústia de Lacan e de referências feitas ao problema da causalidade em Kant naquele contexto. Busca-se identificar na função da causa a dimensão ontológica que Lacan relaciona ao conceito freudiano de inconsciente. Aborda-se a elaboração do objeto a, causa do desejo, a partir dos elementos da pulsão, para analisar qual foi, e para o que aponta a revisão do problema da causalidade proposta por Lacan. Concluindo por meio da indicação de que o que muda com a introdução da causa no campo do sujeito é a própria noção de causa.