by Patrick Pender | Vol 42 (3) 2024
Summary: This essay was originally delivered as a presentation at Duquesne University’s Lacan: Clinic and Culture Conference, which took place October 14-16, 2022. The aim of the essay is twofold. First, it clarifies how the capitalist subject – bourgeois or proletarian – is reproduced as constitutively lacking(-in-enjoyment). Second, it elaborates on the relationship between the libidinal economy of Europe, where “no one enjoys,” and the libidinal economy of the plantation, where “everyone is supposed to enjoy.” The essay is Lacanian in style and Hegelian in form, turning in a dialectical circle, or a ‘riverrun,’ beginning and ending with reflections on the nothingness of Man.
by Michael McAndrew | Vol 40 (4) 2022
Summary: In the ‘Proposition of 9 October 1967 on the psychoanalyst of the School’, Lacan first laid out the procedure of the Pass; to be practiced in the School he founded, L’École Française de Psychanalyse. The founding text of Lacan’s School states that the analyst only authorizes themselves, but “this does not rule out the School guaranteeing that an analyst has been formed by it.” (1967) The Pass itself sought to answer a question Lacan himself was preoccupied with in the training and formation of psychoanalysts: has an analysis produced an analyst? An analyst within Lacan’s School(s) may undertake the Pass to answer this question as the analyst of their own case. The passant delivers their testimony of the end or ends of their analysis to two passeurs; who then relate what they heard to what has been called at different times a jury or cartel of the Pass. If their testimony has been heard to have produced an analyst, the passant is nominated an Analyst of the School for a period of two to three years, in which they speak about their testimony and are put to work on the crucial problems of psychoanalysis and the School. A second question could then be asked based on a reading of testimonies of the Pass: what of the object a in the Pass, at the end of analysis? Through a close reading of testimonies of the Pass of the Schools of Lacan which today practice the Pass, this paper will attempt to examine the object a in the procedure of the Pass, and what may remain of it at the end of analysis, of an analyst that is nominated to an Analyst of the School.
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.
by Dany Nobus | Vol 35 (3) 2017
In an attempt to account for the end (the goal, the direction) of the psychoanalytic treatment, Jacques Lacan has formulated quite a few principles and ideas over the course of his seminars and writings. Amongst these principles, the notion of the ‘traversal of the fantasy’ has come to occupy a priviliged position, despite the fact that it is effectively a hapax in Lacan’s works. This paper offers a succinct study of an alternative principle, which is rarely recognised in the context of discussions on the end of analysis, notably the principle of the signifier of the barred Other S(Ⱥ). The study of this principle generates the thesis that the end of analysis may be conceptualised as the analysis of the end, which constitutes the point where knowledge becomes ignorance, and the point where the symbolic order becomes ‘de-phallicised’. In the discourse of the analyst, the analysis of the end re-appears in the place of the product, where the master signifier symbolises the function of loss. For the knowledge of the psychoanalyst, this implies that a knowledge in the place of truth can only be maintained as a gay science, in the Nietzschean sense of a poetic, joyful and amusing knowledge.
by Samo Tomšič | Vol 35 (1) 2017
This article discusses the influence of Koyré’s epistemology on Lacan’s conception of the real and more broadly on his critical examination of the relation between science and psychoanalysis. The discussion necessitates a systematic return to Koyré, whose visibility in contemporary philosophical and psychoanalytical debates is rather marginal despite his major contribution to the development of epistemology, philosophy and structural psychoanalysis in 20th century France and beyond. The article embeds Lacan’s teaching in a broader intellectual movement of French philosophy of science, which already recognised the necessity of a materialist epistemology. Following this current, Lacan openly associated his take on structuralism with dialectical materialism. Or, this positioning of psychoanalysis can hardly be understood in its overall complexity without re-examining Koyré’s philosophical and epistemological polemics and the influence of his historical examination of the foundations of modern science on mid-20th century structuralism. The latter, one could argue, repeats the modern astronomical revolution in the field of human objects (language, thought, society). Lacan’s structural psychoanalysis was undoubtedly the most radicalised version of this repetition – but precisely this would not have been possible without Koyré’s historical epistemology.
