by Rafael Holmberg | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025
Abstract: In the last century, a misleading opposition has emerged between freedom and restriction, or more properly between individual desire and social structures. Deleuze, and the anti-psychiatric movement more generally, defended the notion of a ‘free desire’ liberated from the oppressive authority of social rituals. The problem with this opposition is that it misrecognizes the basic coordinates of desiring. The Lacanian perspective offers a different account: where social limits are removed, desire itself disappears. Free desire is for Lacan an oxymoron, insofar as desire constitutively operates in relation to the Other, and according to the signifying logic of the social. In other words, the biggest obstacle to desire is desire itself. What, then, is to be made of freedom, if freedom is its own limitation? In this paper, I argue firstly that the false opposition between desire and restriction must be rethought, that the ideology of a de-socialized, liberated desire is in fact the most enslaved form of desiring, directly in the service of the Other. I argue more specifically that freedom for Lacan emerges in a parallax act of recognition, by reframing the very position from which we speak of freedom.
by Adam Schneider | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Summary: Jacques Lacan entered an ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and Catholicism when he delivered his Discourse to Catholics (1960) to the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis. In the 1950s, the Catholic Church under the leadership of Pius XII taught its members to be wary of psychoanalysis due to its focus on desire in the unconscious. Lacan instead argued the essential connection between ethics and desire in Freud’s work and the role of psychoanalysis in facilitating the articulation of desire. Later, in The Triumph of Religion (1974), Lacan argued religion incompletely excretes meaning to conceal problems science discovers, and the world is confronted with the Real. While psychoanalysis directs attention to the Real, “what doesn’t work in the world,” Lacan predicted religion would eventually excrete enough meaning to make psychoanalysis irrelevant. Yet the Church’s position in this dialogue has changed. Joseph Bergoglio attended psychoanalysis in the 1970s and, as Pope Francis, has sought to move the Church away from the moralism of the past, which tied ethics to behavior compliance, and towards nonjudgment which sees ethics enacted through mercy. Rather than continue to sustain concealment of the Real (as the Church has done with clergy sexual abuse), Francis wants to move the Church closer to the Real through his emphasis on people on the margins, evidence of what is not working in the world.
by Marc De Kesel | Vol 41 (2) 2023
Summary: With his twentieth seminar entitled Encore (Still, 1970-1971), Jacques Lacan places a ‘point’ at the end of a sentence constituted by the combined titles of the eighteenth (Of a Discourse that Might Not Be a Semblance, 1971-1972) and nineteenth (… Or Worse, 1972-1973) seminars. Returning to the fifth (1957-1958) and sixth (1958-1959) seminars, in which Lacan described, in the context of his ‘graph of desire’, the point as that what in a chain of signifiers functions as a stop retroactively granting the chain with meaning, De Kesel presents Encore as functioning like a point that reflects on Lacan’s former seminars. Like the earlier work, Encore (Still) portrays human beings as subjects of desire. Linking people’s unquenchable desire for satisfaction to feminine jouissance and the ecstatic experiences of mystics – a fleeting, momentary fulfillment of an endless desire for the absent (divine) lover – Encore states, once more, with another set of signifiers, that the hoped-for attainment of the object of desire – the signified meaning, closure must be suspended, yet again.
by Alenka Zupancic | Vol 41 (2) 2023
Summary: Lacan’s seminar Encore is often read, and not unjustly, as a seminar on enjoyment, jouissance, and especially ‘other jouissance’ or jouissance of the Other, while the topic of desire, so important in Lacan’s earlier work, seems to fade into the background. Contrary to this impression, the paper argues that desire plays a key role in Lacan’s construction of the other jouissance, and explores the complexity of the relationship between desire on the one hand, and enjoyment and drive on the other. The paper also explores the social and political aspects of desire and hysteria as its key figure.
by Dany Nobus | Vol 36 (4) 2018
This essay is intended as a scholarly contribution to the construction of a detailed biography of Lacan’s 1966 Écrits, which is conceived here as a living entity whose influence continues to radiate around the world, within as well as outside psychoanalytic circles. Documenting and re-evaluating the historical circumstances presiding over the book’s gestation, birth and coming of age, the essay first argues that, despite the multiplicity inscribed in its title, Lacan’s volume constitutes an integrated unity rather than a mere collection of disparate papers written over a period of thirty-odd years, albeit a unity that is fundamentally incomplete. Subsequent to this, it is proposed that Lacan’s choice of title (Écrits, writings) occasioned the crystallisation of his own theory of the letter, writing and (knowledge) transmission. Even though this theory was already contained in statu nascendi in two of the papers collected in Écrits, it was only through a process of deferred action that Lacan came to appreciate its significance. Aligning writing with the object a, as cause of desire, Lacan’s theory both underpinned his opposition to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism (and his concurrent promotion of writing as a primordial trace), and informed his own protracted consideration of the transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge during the 1970s via a series of (mathematical and topological) writings.
