by Pablo Lerner | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025
Abstract: This article revolves around the question of how the real should be conceptualized. More specifically, it argues that the real should be defined not solely vis-à-vis the symbolic, as that which resists symbolization, but equally vis-à-vis the imaginary, as that which resists imagination. This enables the author to distinguish between two forms in which the real may appear: the unnameable, which emerges correlative to the symbolic, and the unimaginable, which emerges correlative to the imaginary. Further, the author introduces a conceptual triad corresponding to internal voids inscribed within the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real, naming them silence, darkness, and emptiness. Using this triad, the author introduces a new way of conceptualizing the interrelations of the three orders, viewing them as relating to each other through their separations, to the extent that their internalized voids converge in the disjunction in-between them; for example, in the disjunction of the symbolic and the real, silence and emptiness converge. Lastly, it is postulated that there is a primordial void in the real which subsists outside and independent of the symbolic.
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 Roxanne Moutselou | Vol 42 (3) 2024
Summary: This article argues that knowing the ‘know-how’ as ‘knowing-how-to- control’, how to direct the treatment, extends beyond the ‘how-to’, the purely clinical dimension, mastering one’s subtlety of skills, and chattering about its supposed ethical groundings in the name of the nature of mental illness. It most importantly lies in the ethical implications of knowing the stake in knowledge – its own particular nature – as the constant of an impasse. The contemporary emphasis on the necessity of ‘control’, as evidenced in the ongoing debates on ‘regulation’ and ‘supervision’, and of ‘love’, in the research literature on ‘transference-love’ and ‘therapeutic relationship’, appears to designate ‘cure’ as a product of a harmonious relationship between the two. The article, by showcasing how Lacan’s work goes beyond Freud, capturing logic, attempts to the present inquiry into the stake in knowledge in ‘psy’ therapies is essentially an inquiry into its impasse insofar as ‘control’ and ‘love’, as knowledge effects, are complementary delusions rendering talking therapy pragmatically possible.
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 Gertrudis Van de Vijver | Vol 41 (2) 2023
Summary: This paper articulates the idea that the drive to know is the key to sexuality, and that sexuality is the key to subjectivation. It approaches Lacan’s formulae of sexuation starting from the background of Frege’s distinction between function (predicate) and object (argument) on the one hand, and propositional function and quantifier on the other hand. On this basis, the two sides of the Lacanian formulae are interpreted as ‘the all predicative’, le tout prédicat on the one hand, and the courage of the indecision on the other. That a radically escaping point is not without subjective effect, and does make a difference, epistemologically, ontologically and ethically, is what these formulae are seen to illustrate. Where possible, a comparison is being made with Kant’s transcendental philosophy and logics.
