Edited by Duane Rousselle
See also:
Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue by Alain Badiou & Elisabeth Roudinesco
Showing posts with label Jacques Lacan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacques Lacan. Show all posts
Winnicott, Klein, Bowlby, Lacan, Anna & Sigmund Freud: 6 Psychoanalytic Theorists Introduced in Animated Videos
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, appreciated the many ways in which our minds are troubled and anxious.
Selected Works:
- The Penguin Freud Library - 15 Beautifully Designed Book Covers - A selection of classic Freud texts, in new translations, under the general editorship of Adam Phillips.
Anna Freud
It's to Anna Freud we owe the genius term 'defensiveness' to describe how most of us get some of the time.
Selected Works:
Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein was a great psychotherapist who teaches us how to stop either idealising or denigrating others.
Selected Works:
- Love, Guilt And Reparation
- The Psycho-Analysis Of Children
- Introducing Melanie Klein: A Graphic Guide
John Bowlby
The English psychoanalyst John Bowlby teaches us about Attachment Theory, which is quite simply the best way to understand how and why relationships are tricky.
Selected Works:
- The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds
- A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development
Donald Winnicott
Donald Winnicott has lots to teach us about how to look after children - but also about how not to aim for perfection. Being a 'good enough' parent is good enough...
Selected Works:
Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan was France’s most famous psychoanalyst, who came up with the intriguing concept of the ‘mirror phase.’
Introductory Books on Lacan:
See also
'What is Psychoanalysis?' is a 4-part educational film series by Freud Museum London for students and teachers.
On Being a Patient: A short animation about the experience of psychoanalysis
Umberto Eco's encounter with Lacan in the early 1970s
"Many thanks to Seve Laurent for sharing via Twitter the short account of novelist Umberto Eco’s encounter with Lacan in the early 1970s. Eco tells of his introduction to Lacan through Francois Wahl, editor of Lacan’s Écrits, who passed away last year. Eco had written about Lacan in a semi-critical (though – he is quick to point out – non-polemical) way in his La structure absente (The Absent Structure) in 1968, and had become wary that the enemies of Lacan at his French publisher Le Mercure de France were presenting him as an anti-Lacanian. He relates how Lacan invited him to lunch when the latter visited Milan in the early 1970s. When Eco had to decline on account of jet lag, Lacan delayed his flight back in order to reschedule the appointment. Eco relates that throughout their meeting they spoke neither about psychoanalysis nor semiotics, but simple “cosmic frivolities”, with Eco getting the strong impression that Lacan was eager to charm him. “Never had seduction met with such success”, he writes.
However what most impressed Eco was an intervention Lacan made in the course of the apparently light conversation. Without giving details of its content, Eco realised that Lacan’s intervention was on a different stave of discourse than these “cosmic frivolities” the two were ostensibly chatting about. “We were having dinner”, he writes, “I was talking about something else, perhaps I was talking too passionately about something else and Lacan, with an air of someone talking about something else himself, dropped a word which made me see in another way an experience that I was in the process of living through and to which I was certainly referring, while pretending to talk about something else.” This is a technique many of Lacan’s analysands recall him having employed – hearing a more pertinent resonance behind the apparently banal ‘empty speech’ someone recites. “Lacan had talked absent-mindedly and had invited me to eat my Dasein” Eco writes, in a reference to Lacan’s remark in the Seminar on The Purloined Letter (Écrits, 40). “My life had changed. Lacan never knew it. And yet I believe that with his animal flair for devouring souls he had understood that in speaking of something else it is about myself that I was speaking”. Eco’s fondness for Lacan is palpable, and he remained an acquaintance until the latter’s death. He finishes with the memory of the last time he saw Lacan: sitting in Harry’s Bar in Venice, sipping on one of its famous Cipriani’s Martini. “A wonderful being, enchanting, without pity. A seducer”, Eco sums him up."
Source: News – May 2015, LACANONLINE.COM
Source: News – May 2015, LACANONLINE.COM
Rendez Vous Chez Lacan: Gerard Miller's documentary on one of the world’s most famous and controversial psychoanalysts
Watch online:
An Appointment with Lacan (Rendez Vous Chez Lacan) [English subtitles]
See also:
“The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.”
Dylan Evans: "Lacan's ideas are hopelessly inadequate because they are predicated on a false theory of human nature."
“As I became more familiar with Lacan's teachings, the internal contradictions and lack of external confirmation became ever more apparent. And as I tried to make sense of Lacan's bizarre rhetoric, it became clearer to me that the obfuscatory language did not hide a deeper meaning, but was in fact a direct manifestation of the confusion inherent in Lacan's own thought. But whereas most of Lacan's commentators preferred to ape the master's style, and perpetuate the obscurity, I wanted to dissipate the haze and expose whatever was underneath – even if it meant seeing that the emperor was naked.
Like all British children, I had been given a smattering of physics, chemistry and biology at school, but this consisted solely of isolated facts and figures, without any overall view. Even worse, my high school science gave me no understanding of the process of scientific discovery, the dialectic of evidence and argument. I went on to study languages and linguistics at university, but even here the emphasis was just as much on literature as on the scientific study of language. It is hardly surprising, then, that when I came across the ideas of Jacques Lacan, shortly after finishing my first degree, I was unable to spot their serious defects. Now I understand more about how science works, those defects are so crashingly obvious that I sometimes feel ashamed of myself for being so naïve.”
― Dylan Evans, “From Lacan to Darwin”, in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005, pp.38-55.
Dylan Evans, his name will probably be the most familiar to Lacanian readers thanks to his excellent An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Evans abandoned psychoanalysis for the field of evolutionary psychology in the late 1990s. Just as he wrote the inaugural English-language introductory dictionary to Lacanian psychoanalysis, so he has since written an introductory text to evolutionary psychology. His own account of his move from one field to another – From Lacan to Darwin - makes fascinating reading and can be found here.
Source: Three Non-Lacanian Authors That Every Lacanian Should Read
Like all British children, I had been given a smattering of physics, chemistry and biology at school, but this consisted solely of isolated facts and figures, without any overall view. Even worse, my high school science gave me no understanding of the process of scientific discovery, the dialectic of evidence and argument. I went on to study languages and linguistics at university, but even here the emphasis was just as much on literature as on the scientific study of language. It is hardly surprising, then, that when I came across the ideas of Jacques Lacan, shortly after finishing my first degree, I was unable to spot their serious defects. Now I understand more about how science works, those defects are so crashingly obvious that I sometimes feel ashamed of myself for being so naïve.”
― Dylan Evans, “From Lacan to Darwin”, in The Literary Animal; Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, eds. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005, pp.38-55.
Dylan Evans, his name will probably be the most familiar to Lacanian readers thanks to his excellent An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Evans abandoned psychoanalysis for the field of evolutionary psychology in the late 1990s. Just as he wrote the inaugural English-language introductory dictionary to Lacanian psychoanalysis, so he has since written an introductory text to evolutionary psychology. His own account of his move from one field to another – From Lacan to Darwin - makes fascinating reading and can be found here.
Source: Three Non-Lacanian Authors That Every Lacanian Should Read
Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Universalism, Politics
The American University of Beirut Arts and Humanities (Mellon Grant) Faculty of Arts and Sciences held a seminar "Lacan contra Foucault Subjectivity, Universalism, Politics
While Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault are both enormously influential theorists within the humanities, their work has inspired divergent and often explicitly antagonistic theoretical agendas. What is at stake in each thinker’s work pertains to the core questions and critiques of Enlightenment and Modernity. Both Lacan and Foucault challenge the Kantian compact between reason, autonomy, and freedom, but they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences for our understanding of universalism, law, reason, habits, and the passions. The aim of this conference is to try to clarify the nature of this divergence as well as the stakes of this antagonism. It will do so by focusing on three fundamental topics of disagreement that divide Lacan from Foucault: the nature of the subject; the status of the universal; and the function of politics.
The Absence of the Sexual Relationship: Invariant of the Species or Historical Phase?
Lorenzo Chiesa, Genoa School of Humanities
Is what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the ‘absence of the sexual relationship’ the basic – transcendental and biological – invariant of the speaking animal? Or should it be understood as a historical product strictly linked with the advent of modern science? Also, assuming that language is structurally incomplete, and therefore that homo sapienscannot avoid the dialectic of semblance and truth, does this necessarily entail that the absence of any meta-language always correspond to the absence of the sexual relationship? In this paper I will show how, in his Seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lacan develops two different, if not incompatible, narratives. The paper should pave the way for a broader discussion of how the ‘historicist temptation’ Lacan finally does not succumb to intersects with Foucault’s considerations on human nature (especially in his 1971 conversation with Chomsky). Could we maintain, as has recently been suggested, that Foucault himself belongs to a ‘Freudian paradigm’ for which history is made of ‘true fictions’? Does such an understanding of the ‘Freudian paradigm’ not run the risk of turning Foucault into a Freudian only at the price of labelling Lacan as anti-Freudian?
No: Foucault
Joan Copjec, Brown University
Despite the telegraphed “no” of the title, this paper is not a full-scale rejection of Foucault, but a firm dismissal of his rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis. The latter rejection is based primarily on Foucault’s claim that in psychoanalysis every negation amounts to the same one. The simple claim of the paper is not only “not so!” but also an attempt to recover what is radical in Freud and lost on Foucault.
The Other Space of the Communist Party
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
This paper puts Lacan’s account of the Other Space to work in a theory of the communist party. Lacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap, a gap where something happens but remains unrealized. It’s not that this something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealized makes itself felt. It exerts a pressure. The function of the transference in analysis is forcing the gap. Through the transference different unconscious agencies in the subject become manifest. The transference registers the effects of an Other beyond analyst and analysand: the analytic relation is not reducible to the interaction between them; it is the site of the appearance of an Other. The transference is important for a theory of the party because of its function “as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious.” Insofar as the party is a form that accesses the discharge that has ended, the crowd that has gone home, the people who are not there but exert a force nonetheless, it is a site of transferential relations. Rather than rejecting these relations in a fantasy of politics without power, I emphasize the importance of the psychic effects of sociality in building collective strength. Institutions are symbolic arrangements that organize and concentrate the social space. They “fix” an Other, not in the sense of immobilizing it but in the sense of putting in relation the emergent effects of sociality. This “putting in relation” substantializes the link, giving it its force, enabling it to exert its pressure. A party is an organization and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics. For communists this is a politics of and for the working class, the producers, the oppressed, the people as the rest of us. “Party” knots together effects of ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know, and subject supposed to believe. The particular content of any of these component effects changes over time and place even as the operations they designate remain as features of the party form. I illustrate my argument with examples from The Party Organizer, a third period publication of the CPUSA. I put my argument to work in a critique of John Holloway’s Foucauldian anarchism.
Cutting Off the King’s Head
Mladen Dolar, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
In a famous pronouncement Foucault said: “It is necessary to cut off the king’s head: in political theory this hasn’t happened yet.” Political theory kept being stuck, in one way or another, with the framework of sovereignty, law, repression, instead of envisaging the new dispositives of power in their heterogeneous multiplicity, proliferation and productivity, the emergence of biopolitics etc. This goes also for psychoanalysis which was prey to the ‘monarchy of sex’ (as he famously put it on the last page of the first volume of the History of sexuality), unable to abandon the framework of prohibition, the father, the law and repression, instead of espousing bodies and pleasures, and was thus itself, unwittingly, a major mechanism of power it allegedly opposed. The paper will try to scrutinize some assumptions of this way of seeing the opposition and framing the question. There is something missing in the massive alternative between the monarchy of the sovereign, father, law, sex, truth on the one hand, and multiplicity, heterogeneity, proliferation, bodies, pleasure on the other, the alternative on which Foucault’s work, in its vast elaborate ramifications, seems to be premised.
Exchanging Memory: Reflections on Postwar Enjoyment
Rohit Goel, University of Chicago
My paper uses the example of Lebanon to show how memory of past atrocity is a fetish object of useless enjoyment that overshoots the very need it at once constructs and aims to satisfy: avoiding the repetition of past violence. Putting Lacan’s theory of discourse into conversation with Marx’s analysis of value in capital, I argue that postwar “transitional” justice mechanisms, hegemonic after 1989, steer toward the perpetual accumulation of knowledge about the past — what Lacan calls surplus-enjoyment or jouissance or a and Marx calls surplus-value — at the expense of working through history to overcome the recurrence of social antagonism. Along the way, I argue that reading Lacan with Marx to analyze “late capitalism” or postwar liberal society offers a high stakes corrective to structuralist and poststructuralist pronouncements of “the death of the subject.” For instance, Michel Foucault’s diagnosis of the nexus of knowledge and power as absolute tends to a politics of silence in the face of necessarily alienating discourses (on madness, criminalization, sexuality…), either retreating to a “care of the self” or self-consciously refusing to engage the constitutive contradictions of discourse for fear of reproducing the latter’s terms/potency. I conclude by suggesting alternatives to liberal transitional justice programs as well as structuralist/poststructuralist subject annihilation in the aftermath of catastrophe.
Valuation and Enjoyment: Lacan and Foucault through Marx and Bataille
Robert Meister, University of California, Santa Cruz
I begin with the questions of politics implied by a schematic reading of Foucault through Lacan: Is Foucault’s account of knowledge/power reducible to a technique for translating University Discourse into a Discourse of the Master? How can this be done except through the Discourse of the Hysteric? What else could be desired here except for a true Master? And didn’t Foucault himself become that Master in the post-modern University Discourse created by my generation of left-academics who came of age in the aftermath of 1968?
This is of course a caricature, but rather than qualify it through a more comprehensive reading of Foucault’s Lectures and Lacan’s Seminars, I want to draw out the political project of moving beyond these three quarter-turns of Lacan’s discursive dial, especially in an era of financialized capitalism. Instead of debunking Foucault in favor of Lacan, my central claim is that Foucault provides an academically assimilable version of Georges Bataille, whose Accursed Share exhibits the micro-foundations of Foucault’s early project I thus argue that Foucault carried forward Bataille’s critique of dominant strands of French Hegelianism into the realm of historical studies in much the way that Marx did for his own critique of Hegel and left-Hegelianism. Because Lacan, also had a lifelong engagement with the same critique of conscious mind (via the death instinct) that obsessed Bataille, Lacan’s late turn to Marx and materialism in response to 1968 is a good site on which to raise the question of thinking Marx with Bataille, or asking what it means for capitalism to have an unconscious.
My main argument in the paper is about why the unconscious of capitalism is especially important in the era of its subsumption by finance that Lacan and Foucault did not live to see. In financialized capitalism the creation units of capital preservation–quite literally hedges and options–has equal importance to the production of commodities and the employment of labor power in earlier version of capitalism that have been well-analyzed from a Lacanian perspective by Zupançiç, Žižek and others. I argue that financialized capitalism in important ways confesses the post-modern critique of its prehistory, denaturalizing the “real economy” and making its continuation expressly contingent on the liquidity of markets, which is itself ultimately a political/financial project involving the commensurability of public and private debt.
An effect of this transformation is that fully financialized subjects would no longer think of themselves as owners of skills, but rather as managers of a portfolio of attributes the contents of which must be continuously rebalanced and rehedged in order to provide resiliency, which is now expressly considered as a measure of downside protection against risks that are no longer worth taking now that we know what dangers we have been lucky enough to survive. What, then, can be said of our collective enjoyment of the gains accumulated by those who harvest the upside generated by this heightened volatility? My paper will analyze the relationship between security and insecurity, life and death in the unconscious of a financialized subject who no longer thinks merely as a commoditized individual. Are there political potentialities here that have been missed by more productionist versions of historical materialism that dismiss the important changes represented by finance in the Real of capitalist desire?
Desire & Pleasure: Deleuze and Foucault’s Readings of Wilhelm Reich
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
In this paper, I defend the thesis that in order to understand Foucault and Deleuze’s diametrically opposed views regarding desire and pleasure, one has to analyze the ways in which those thinkers have been influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s works.
Reich’s 1946 The Mass Psychology of Fascism has played a central role in framing the political questions surrounding the repression of sexuality. Deleuze’s political writings have been influenced by this Freudo-Marxist perspective, up to the point that in Anti-Oedipus (1972), he and Guattari claim that Reich, after Spinoza, has rediscovered the fundamental problem of political philosophy: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Deleuze & Guattari continue, “after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?” In this case, an appeal to ignorance would be an epistemic failure. Following Reich, Deleuze & Guattari provide us with a different explanation – one that revives the notion of desire. Our desires are positive insofar as “what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation.” Instead of extracting an object that is presumed to be the object of desire (negative explanation), we are always in the process of constructing a positive social assemblage. Deleuze & Guattari reinforce Reich’s sex-economic hypothesis since they recognize that libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same. And if our desires are social from the beginning, in a way, they are not our own. This is the only way we can understand our investment in social formations that repress us. Our desires are not just a part of one’s psychic reality. They are always already part of the very social formation one finds oneself in.
As early as 1973, Foucault distances himself from Reich’s Freudo-Marxist approach, and also from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In his Rio lecture, Foucault notes, “I admit that a problem such as this [Anti-Oedipus) is very appealing to me, and that I am also tempted to look behind what is claimed to be the Oedipus story – for something unrelated to the indeterminate, endlessly repeated story of our desire and our unconscious, but related to the history of a power, a political power.” In his 1975 talk at Columbia University (at the Schizo-Culture Conference), Foucault reiterates this point in an even bolder manner: “I now see the Reichian schema as an obstacle rather than an instrument.”(154) The Reichian schema is fully revealed as an obstacle only in 1976 in La Volonté de Savoir. Foucault’s argument assumes that any explanation of sexuality that focuses primarily on sexual repression (as Reich does) cannot escape analyzing the underlying power mechanism otherwise than in a reduced, schematic, and negative form. “Which is to say [..], these analyses assume that power exerts itself basically in the form of an interdiction and exclusion.” Against Reich, Foucault argues that rather than being deductive, the power mechanisms produce, invent, create, and ultimately normalize sexual subjects. Reich’s failure, and to a certain extent Deleuze & Guattari’s as well, is to confound and to merge the strategies of power with the interdictions of the law and with the mechanisms of domination and exploitation. Hence, “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”
Capitalist Forms of Subjectivity: Foucault between Psychoanalysis and Marxism
Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki
The paper argues that Foucault makes an important contribution to our understanding of capitalist forms of subjectivity – a problem that Marxism, psychoanalysis and the combinations of the two have struggled with. Moreover, I will show that Foucault’s break-through in this field of questioning, namely his account of productive power, can be understood as a critical response to the problems that both psychoanalysis and Marxism had in theorizing the relationship between power and subjectivity.
The argument proceeds in three parts. In the first section I will consider how Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality is modified in a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1976 titled ‘The Mesh of Power’. In this lecture Foucault notably develops his account of productive power in dialogue with Lacan and Marx. In the second section I will turn to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and argue that in these lectures we find his most developed view of the homo economicus as the capitalist form of subjectivity. I will conclude by briefly considering the consequences of Foucault’s account for our current understanding of ourselves.
What Comes After “The Death of Man”: Foucault and Lacan, Sexuality and Freedom
Aaron Schuster, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam
Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a highly complex one. From his early enthusiasm inThe Order of Things, in which psychoanalysis is assigned a privileged place in the account of the birth of the human sciences and their possible “beyond,” Foucault ends up, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, becoming one of its most powerful critics, denouncing the “repressive hypothesis” as one of the prevalent myths of modern power. Yet some years later, in his lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82), Foucault praises Lacan as the one of the few thinkers to thematize the relation between the subject and truth. In this talk, I will disentangle this relationship by focusing on one key moment: Foucault’s and Lacan’s interpretations of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, and how they reflect different understandings of subjectivity and modernity. I will show how Foucault and Lacan draw two contrasting conclusions from the “death of Man,” i.e. the crisis of the human sciences and the eclipse of their vision of a central constituting subject or transcendental ego. I will then look back on Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project, and examine how these competing conceptions of subjectivity impact on the understanding of sexuality and the possibility of emancipation.
Biopolitics, Sexuality, and the Unconscious
Alenka Zupančič, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
The lecture deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of ‘biopolitics’ through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault’s account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality – namely the unconscious. It argues that this omission amounts to a conceptual decision which has important and far-reaching consequences for the (Foucauldian) concept of biopolitics as such.
While Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault are both enormously influential theorists within the humanities, their work has inspired divergent and often explicitly antagonistic theoretical agendas. What is at stake in each thinker’s work pertains to the core questions and critiques of Enlightenment and Modernity. Both Lacan and Foucault challenge the Kantian compact between reason, autonomy, and freedom, but they do so in very different ways and with very different consequences for our understanding of universalism, law, reason, habits, and the passions. The aim of this conference is to try to clarify the nature of this divergence as well as the stakes of this antagonism. It will do so by focusing on three fundamental topics of disagreement that divide Lacan from Foucault: the nature of the subject; the status of the universal; and the function of politics.
Speakers:
The Absence of the Sexual Relationship: Invariant of the Species or Historical Phase?
Lorenzo Chiesa, Genoa School of Humanities
Is what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the ‘absence of the sexual relationship’ the basic – transcendental and biological – invariant of the speaking animal? Or should it be understood as a historical product strictly linked with the advent of modern science? Also, assuming that language is structurally incomplete, and therefore that homo sapienscannot avoid the dialectic of semblance and truth, does this necessarily entail that the absence of any meta-language always correspond to the absence of the sexual relationship? In this paper I will show how, in his Seminars of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lacan develops two different, if not incompatible, narratives. The paper should pave the way for a broader discussion of how the ‘historicist temptation’ Lacan finally does not succumb to intersects with Foucault’s considerations on human nature (especially in his 1971 conversation with Chomsky). Could we maintain, as has recently been suggested, that Foucault himself belongs to a ‘Freudian paradigm’ for which history is made of ‘true fictions’? Does such an understanding of the ‘Freudian paradigm’ not run the risk of turning Foucault into a Freudian only at the price of labelling Lacan as anti-Freudian?
No: Foucault
Joan Copjec, Brown University
Despite the telegraphed “no” of the title, this paper is not a full-scale rejection of Foucault, but a firm dismissal of his rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis. The latter rejection is based primarily on Foucault’s claim that in psychoanalysis every negation amounts to the same one. The simple claim of the paper is not only “not so!” but also an attempt to recover what is radical in Freud and lost on Foucault.
The Other Space of the Communist Party
Jodi Dean, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
This paper puts Lacan’s account of the Other Space to work in a theory of the communist party. Lacan associates the Freudian unconscious with a gap, a gap where something happens but remains unrealized. It’s not that this something is or is not there, that it exists or doesn’t exist. Rather, the unrealized makes itself felt. It exerts a pressure. The function of the transference in analysis is forcing the gap. Through the transference different unconscious agencies in the subject become manifest. The transference registers the effects of an Other beyond analyst and analysand: the analytic relation is not reducible to the interaction between them; it is the site of the appearance of an Other. The transference is important for a theory of the party because of its function “as a mode of access to what is hidden in the unconscious.” Insofar as the party is a form that accesses the discharge that has ended, the crowd that has gone home, the people who are not there but exert a force nonetheless, it is a site of transferential relations. Rather than rejecting these relations in a fantasy of politics without power, I emphasize the importance of the psychic effects of sociality in building collective strength. Institutions are symbolic arrangements that organize and concentrate the social space. They “fix” an Other, not in the sense of immobilizing it but in the sense of putting in relation the emergent effects of sociality. This “putting in relation” substantializes the link, giving it its force, enabling it to exert its pressure. A party is an organization and concentration of sociality in behalf of a certain politics. For communists this is a politics of and for the working class, the producers, the oppressed, the people as the rest of us. “Party” knots together effects of ideal ego, ego ideal, superego, subject supposed to know, and subject supposed to believe. The particular content of any of these component effects changes over time and place even as the operations they designate remain as features of the party form. I illustrate my argument with examples from The Party Organizer, a third period publication of the CPUSA. I put my argument to work in a critique of John Holloway’s Foucauldian anarchism.
Cutting Off the King’s Head
Mladen Dolar, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
In a famous pronouncement Foucault said: “It is necessary to cut off the king’s head: in political theory this hasn’t happened yet.” Political theory kept being stuck, in one way or another, with the framework of sovereignty, law, repression, instead of envisaging the new dispositives of power in their heterogeneous multiplicity, proliferation and productivity, the emergence of biopolitics etc. This goes also for psychoanalysis which was prey to the ‘monarchy of sex’ (as he famously put it on the last page of the first volume of the History of sexuality), unable to abandon the framework of prohibition, the father, the law and repression, instead of espousing bodies and pleasures, and was thus itself, unwittingly, a major mechanism of power it allegedly opposed. The paper will try to scrutinize some assumptions of this way of seeing the opposition and framing the question. There is something missing in the massive alternative between the monarchy of the sovereign, father, law, sex, truth on the one hand, and multiplicity, heterogeneity, proliferation, bodies, pleasure on the other, the alternative on which Foucault’s work, in its vast elaborate ramifications, seems to be premised.
Exchanging Memory: Reflections on Postwar Enjoyment
Rohit Goel, University of Chicago
My paper uses the example of Lebanon to show how memory of past atrocity is a fetish object of useless enjoyment that overshoots the very need it at once constructs and aims to satisfy: avoiding the repetition of past violence. Putting Lacan’s theory of discourse into conversation with Marx’s analysis of value in capital, I argue that postwar “transitional” justice mechanisms, hegemonic after 1989, steer toward the perpetual accumulation of knowledge about the past — what Lacan calls surplus-enjoyment or jouissance or a and Marx calls surplus-value — at the expense of working through history to overcome the recurrence of social antagonism. Along the way, I argue that reading Lacan with Marx to analyze “late capitalism” or postwar liberal society offers a high stakes corrective to structuralist and poststructuralist pronouncements of “the death of the subject.” For instance, Michel Foucault’s diagnosis of the nexus of knowledge and power as absolute tends to a politics of silence in the face of necessarily alienating discourses (on madness, criminalization, sexuality…), either retreating to a “care of the self” or self-consciously refusing to engage the constitutive contradictions of discourse for fear of reproducing the latter’s terms/potency. I conclude by suggesting alternatives to liberal transitional justice programs as well as structuralist/poststructuralist subject annihilation in the aftermath of catastrophe.
Valuation and Enjoyment: Lacan and Foucault through Marx and Bataille
Robert Meister, University of California, Santa Cruz
I begin with the questions of politics implied by a schematic reading of Foucault through Lacan: Is Foucault’s account of knowledge/power reducible to a technique for translating University Discourse into a Discourse of the Master? How can this be done except through the Discourse of the Hysteric? What else could be desired here except for a true Master? And didn’t Foucault himself become that Master in the post-modern University Discourse created by my generation of left-academics who came of age in the aftermath of 1968?
This is of course a caricature, but rather than qualify it through a more comprehensive reading of Foucault’s Lectures and Lacan’s Seminars, I want to draw out the political project of moving beyond these three quarter-turns of Lacan’s discursive dial, especially in an era of financialized capitalism. Instead of debunking Foucault in favor of Lacan, my central claim is that Foucault provides an academically assimilable version of Georges Bataille, whose Accursed Share exhibits the micro-foundations of Foucault’s early project I thus argue that Foucault carried forward Bataille’s critique of dominant strands of French Hegelianism into the realm of historical studies in much the way that Marx did for his own critique of Hegel and left-Hegelianism. Because Lacan, also had a lifelong engagement with the same critique of conscious mind (via the death instinct) that obsessed Bataille, Lacan’s late turn to Marx and materialism in response to 1968 is a good site on which to raise the question of thinking Marx with Bataille, or asking what it means for capitalism to have an unconscious.
My main argument in the paper is about why the unconscious of capitalism is especially important in the era of its subsumption by finance that Lacan and Foucault did not live to see. In financialized capitalism the creation units of capital preservation–quite literally hedges and options–has equal importance to the production of commodities and the employment of labor power in earlier version of capitalism that have been well-analyzed from a Lacanian perspective by Zupançiç, Žižek and others. I argue that financialized capitalism in important ways confesses the post-modern critique of its prehistory, denaturalizing the “real economy” and making its continuation expressly contingent on the liquidity of markets, which is itself ultimately a political/financial project involving the commensurability of public and private debt.
An effect of this transformation is that fully financialized subjects would no longer think of themselves as owners of skills, but rather as managers of a portfolio of attributes the contents of which must be continuously rebalanced and rehedged in order to provide resiliency, which is now expressly considered as a measure of downside protection against risks that are no longer worth taking now that we know what dangers we have been lucky enough to survive. What, then, can be said of our collective enjoyment of the gains accumulated by those who harvest the upside generated by this heightened volatility? My paper will analyze the relationship between security and insecurity, life and death in the unconscious of a financialized subject who no longer thinks merely as a commoditized individual. Are there political potentialities here that have been missed by more productionist versions of historical materialism that dismiss the important changes represented by finance in the Real of capitalist desire?
Desire & Pleasure: Deleuze and Foucault’s Readings of Wilhelm Reich
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
In this paper, I defend the thesis that in order to understand Foucault and Deleuze’s diametrically opposed views regarding desire and pleasure, one has to analyze the ways in which those thinkers have been influenced by Wilhelm Reich’s works.
Reich’s 1946 The Mass Psychology of Fascism has played a central role in framing the political questions surrounding the repression of sexuality. Deleuze’s political writings have been influenced by this Freudo-Marxist perspective, up to the point that in Anti-Oedipus (1972), he and Guattari claim that Reich, after Spinoza, has rediscovered the fundamental problem of political philosophy: “Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?” Deleuze & Guattari continue, “after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves?” In this case, an appeal to ignorance would be an epistemic failure. Following Reich, Deleuze & Guattari provide us with a different explanation – one that revives the notion of desire. Our desires are positive insofar as “what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation.” Instead of extracting an object that is presumed to be the object of desire (negative explanation), we are always in the process of constructing a positive social assemblage. Deleuze & Guattari reinforce Reich’s sex-economic hypothesis since they recognize that libidinal economy and political economy are one and the same. And if our desires are social from the beginning, in a way, they are not our own. This is the only way we can understand our investment in social formations that repress us. Our desires are not just a part of one’s psychic reality. They are always already part of the very social formation one finds oneself in.
As early as 1973, Foucault distances himself from Reich’s Freudo-Marxist approach, and also from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In his Rio lecture, Foucault notes, “I admit that a problem such as this [Anti-Oedipus) is very appealing to me, and that I am also tempted to look behind what is claimed to be the Oedipus story – for something unrelated to the indeterminate, endlessly repeated story of our desire and our unconscious, but related to the history of a power, a political power.” In his 1975 talk at Columbia University (at the Schizo-Culture Conference), Foucault reiterates this point in an even bolder manner: “I now see the Reichian schema as an obstacle rather than an instrument.”(154) The Reichian schema is fully revealed as an obstacle only in 1976 in La Volonté de Savoir. Foucault’s argument assumes that any explanation of sexuality that focuses primarily on sexual repression (as Reich does) cannot escape analyzing the underlying power mechanism otherwise than in a reduced, schematic, and negative form. “Which is to say [..], these analyses assume that power exerts itself basically in the form of an interdiction and exclusion.” Against Reich, Foucault argues that rather than being deductive, the power mechanisms produce, invent, create, and ultimately normalize sexual subjects. Reich’s failure, and to a certain extent Deleuze & Guattari’s as well, is to confound and to merge the strategies of power with the interdictions of the law and with the mechanisms of domination and exploitation. Hence, “the rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.”
Capitalist Forms of Subjectivity: Foucault between Psychoanalysis and Marxism
Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki
The paper argues that Foucault makes an important contribution to our understanding of capitalist forms of subjectivity – a problem that Marxism, psychoanalysis and the combinations of the two have struggled with. Moreover, I will show that Foucault’s break-through in this field of questioning, namely his account of productive power, can be understood as a critical response to the problems that both psychoanalysis and Marxism had in theorizing the relationship between power and subjectivity.
The argument proceeds in three parts. In the first section I will consider how Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in The History of Sexuality is modified in a lecture delivered in Brazil in 1976 titled ‘The Mesh of Power’. In this lecture Foucault notably develops his account of productive power in dialogue with Lacan and Marx. In the second section I will turn to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality and argue that in these lectures we find his most developed view of the homo economicus as the capitalist form of subjectivity. I will conclude by briefly considering the consequences of Foucault’s account for our current understanding of ourselves.
What Comes After “The Death of Man”: Foucault and Lacan, Sexuality and Freedom
Aaron Schuster, Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam
Foucault’s relationship to psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, is a highly complex one. From his early enthusiasm inThe Order of Things, in which psychoanalysis is assigned a privileged place in the account of the birth of the human sciences and their possible “beyond,” Foucault ends up, in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, becoming one of its most powerful critics, denouncing the “repressive hypothesis” as one of the prevalent myths of modern power. Yet some years later, in his lecture course The Hermeneutics of the Subject (1981-82), Foucault praises Lacan as the one of the few thinkers to thematize the relation between the subject and truth. In this talk, I will disentangle this relationship by focusing on one key moment: Foucault’s and Lacan’s interpretations of Diego Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, and how they reflect different understandings of subjectivity and modernity. I will show how Foucault and Lacan draw two contrasting conclusions from the “death of Man,” i.e. the crisis of the human sciences and the eclipse of their vision of a central constituting subject or transcendental ego. I will then look back on Foucault’s “history of sexuality” project, and examine how these competing conceptions of subjectivity impact on the understanding of sexuality and the possibility of emancipation.
Biopolitics, Sexuality, and the Unconscious
Alenka Zupančič, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
The lecture deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of ‘biopolitics’ through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault’s account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality – namely the unconscious. It argues that this omission amounts to a conceptual decision which has important and far-reaching consequences for the (Foucauldian) concept of biopolitics as such.
Jung-Lacan Dialogues: The Psychoid and the Real
This is the second in a series of Jung-Lacan Dialogues aimed at fostering an engagement between two important and creative schools of psychoanalysis. What is the common ground between them? What are the intractable differences? Is it possible to find a common language or achieve mutual understandings? And what are the implications for clinical practice?
Is there any commonality between Jung’s idea of the Psychoid and Lacan’s conceptualisation of the Real? And what are the specifics of the differences between these two important clinical concepts? Alistair Black and David Henderson will elaborate the history and development of the terms and reflect on the implications for clinical work.
Dr Alistair Black is a psychoanalyst in the Lacanian tradition in private practice in south London. He is a member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR). Recent publications include 'Lacan's encounter with a Buddhist statue and the gaze as objet a ' in Psychoanalytische Perspectieven.
David Henderson, PhD is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and senior lecturer in psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University. He is a member of the Association of Independent Psychotherapists (AIP) Recent publications include, Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis, published by Routledge and ‘Freud and Jung: The creation of the psychoanalytic universe,’ published in Psychodynamic Practice.
The Psychoid and the Real
Is there any commonality between Jung’s idea of the Psychoid and Lacan’s conceptualisation of the Real? And what are the specifics of the differences between these two important clinical concepts? Alistair Black and David Henderson will elaborate the history and development of the terms and reflect on the implications for clinical work.
David Henderson, PhD is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice and senior lecturer in psychoanalysis at the Centre for Psychoanalysis, Middlesex University. He is a member of the Association of Independent Psychotherapists (AIP) Recent publications include, Apophatic Elements in the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis, published by Routledge and ‘Freud and Jung: The creation of the psychoanalytic universe,’ published in Psychodynamic Practice.
ラカン ｌａｃａｎ Ａ Ｅ Ｓ Ｔ Ｈ Ｅ Ｔ Ｉ Ｃ Ｓ
ジャック=マリー=エミール・ラカン
ジャック=マリー=エミール・ラカン（Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan、1901年4月13日 - 1981年9月9日）は、フランスの哲学者、精神科医、精神分析家。
Lacan on Love: An Exploration of Lacan's Seminar VIII, Transference
Buy Lacan on Love here. - Free delivery worldwide
Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle.
In this lively and wide–ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in–depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan s paradoxical claim that love is giving what you don t have. He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don t have.
This first–ever commentary on Lacan s Seminar VIII, Transference, provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan s views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychoanalysis and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.
See also
Since Lacan: Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne: Volume 25
Since Lacan is the latest volume of the Papers of the Freudian School of Melbourne, School of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, founded in 1977. As such it is comprised of original papers by analysts and members of the School and other invited international contributors.
Contributors: Madeline Andrews, Linda Clifton, Michael Currie, Helen Dell, Alicia Evans, Sarah Jones Ferguson, Guy Le Gaufey, Peter Gunn, Jon Kettle, Rodney Kleiman, Malcolm Morgan, Tine Nørregaard, David Pereira, Michael Gerard Plastow, Megan Williams, and Oscar Zentner.
Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics
Buy Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics here. - Free delivery worldwide
The volume is split into three distinct sections:
- Psychoanalysis and Politics: this section will frame the discussion by providing general background of Lacan’s engagement with politics and the political
- Lacan and the Political: each chapter will focus on different key ideas and concepts in Lacan’s thought including ethics, justice, discourse, object a, symptom, jouissance
- Political Encounters: seeks to represent different ways of engaging with Lacanian thought and ways of adopting it to explain and comment on global political phenomena
Buy Jacques Lacan: Between Psychoanalysis and Politics here. - Free delivery worldwide
Lacan's Ethics and Nietzsche's Critique of Platonism
Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics.
Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics
At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes.
Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics.
Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.
See also
The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues
Buy The New Klein-Lacan Dialogues here. - Free delivery worldwide
Deeply relevant to both theoretical reflection and clinical work, the New Klein-Lacan Dialogues should make interesting reading for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, mental health professionals, scholars and all those who wish to know more about these two leading figures in the field of psychoanalysis.
The collection centres around key concepts such as: 'symbolic function', the 'ego', the 'object', the 'body', 'trauma', 'autism', 'affect' and 'history and archives'. The authors are internationally renowned writers and clinicians and include: Eva Bahovec, Lionel Bailly, Rachel Blass, Ronald Britton, Catalina Bronstein, Bernard Burgoyne, Robert Hinshelwood, Roberto Ileyassoff, Marie-Christine Laznik, Elias Mallet da Rocha Barros, Catherine Mathelin-Vanier, Maria Rhode, Elisabeth Roudinesco, Richard Rusbridger, Michael Rustin , Paul Verhaeghe and Marcus Vieria.
Re-opening a dialogue first attempted with great success in 1995 ('The Klein-Lacan Dialogues', organised by Catalina Bronstein and Bernard Burgoyne), this book is based on a new international seminar series collaboratively organised by colleagues at UCL, Middlesex University, and the Royal College of Art and held in 2011 under the auspices of the UCL Psychoanalysis Unit.
Melanie Klein's works are collected in four volumes:
- Volume 1 – Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 2 – The Psychoanalysis of Children, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 3 – Envy and Gratitude, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 4 – Narrative of a Child Analysis, London: Hogarth Press.
Selected books on Melanie Klein:
The Klein-Lacan Dialogues
Buy The Klein-Lacan Dialogues here. - Free delivery worldwide
Among the speakers were Margaret Rustin, Bice Benvenuto, Catalina Bronstein, Bernard Burgoyne, Robert M. Young, Darian Leader, Jane Temperley, Dany Nobus, Robert Hinshelwood, Vicente Palomera, Robin Anderson, Filip Geerardyn, and Marc du Ry. The book is rounded off by contributions from two of the giants of psychoanalysis - Eric Laurent for Lacan and Donald Meltzer for Klein.
Melanie Klein's works are collected in four volumes:
- Volume 1 – Love, Guilt and Reparation: And Other Works 1921–1945, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 2 – The Psychoanalysis of Children, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 3 – Envy and Gratitude, London: Hogarth Press.
- Volume 4 – Narrative of a Child Analysis, London: Hogarth Press.
Selected books on Melanie Klein:
“—What do Americans want?—I have the answer! A partial answer. They want Slavoj Zizek! They want the Lacan of Slavoj Zizek.”
Jacques-Alain Miller on Slavoj Žižek:
“So you remember that Freud asked himself the famous question, “What do women want?” As a man, he asked himself this question; and perhaps as a woman too. We do not have the answer, in spite of thirty years of Lacan’s teaching. We tried. So it’s not a discriminating question. I have another question, which has been troubling me for years, which is —What do Americans want?—I have the answer! A partial answer. They want Slavoj Zizek! They want the Lacan of Slavoj Zizek. They like it better than the Lacan of the Freudian Field, for the time being perhaps. The question is, do they want very definite concepts? Or do they want some room to wrangle? Some negotiating space? And that is the case with the concepts of psychoanalysis.”
from Ordinary Psychosis lacanian ink 46
“Slavoj Žižek on Jacques-Alain Miller, "The only absolute pedagogical genius that" he knows...”
See also
Claude Lévi-Strauss and his first session of Lacan's seminar. He would not get over it..
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| Claude Lévi-Strauss, self-portrait (with monkey) in Brazil, 1938. |
"What was striking was the kind of radiant influence emanating from both Lacan's physical person and from his diction, his gestures. I have seen quite a few shamans functioning in exotic societies, and I rediscovered there a kind of equivalent of the shaman's power. I confess that, as far as what I heard went I didn’t understand. And I found myself in the middle of an audience that seemed to understand ..."
Claude Lévi-Strauss as quoted in Jacques Lacan & Co: A History of Psychoanalysis in France
Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.”
Lacan: Seminar recording - watch online this extremely rare recording of Lacan giving a lecture at Louvain University on 13th Octover 1972.
Lacan’s Confrontation with a Young Rebel: Classic Moment
“The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.”
The 71-year-old Lacan never loses his composure. (His cigar appears bent out of shape, but it was that way from the beginning.) The audience, too, retains a certain Gallic nonchalance. Dangerous Minds sums it up in the headline “The Single Most ‘French’ Moment in all of 1972: Jacques Lacan Accosted, But No One Stops Smoking.” The scene is from Jacques Lacan Speaks, a one-hour documentary by Belgian filmmaker Françoise Wolff. You can watch the complete film, which includes Lacan’s extended and rather cryptic response to the incident and other excerpts from the lecture, followed by Wolff’s interview with Lacan the following day, in our post:
Jacques Lacan’s Lecture at Louvain (1972)
Jacques Lacan’s Lecture at Louvain
This footage is from an extremely rare recording of Lacan giving a lecture at Louvain University on 13th Octover 1972.
See also: Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) came to psychoanalysis by way of medicine and psychiatry. In 1951 he turned his attention to the training of analysts, and this was one of the issues which led him and his circle to part company with the Société Psychanalytique de Paris. He became, in 1953, the first President of a new group, the Société Française de Psychanalyse, whose declared aim was a return to the true teaching of Freud. Eleven years later the Société Française was dissolved and, under Lacan’s direction, gave birth to the École Freudienne de Paris. Jacques Lacan was a practising psychoanalyst and teacher up until his death in 1981.
´~ Lacan For Beginners
Lacan and Klein, Creation and Discovery: An Essay of Reintroduction
Written for clinicians as well as for students and scholars interested in psychoanalysis and philosophy, this book serves not only as a comprehensive introduction to Lacan, but also a reassessment of psychoanalytic method.
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