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 Bernd Van Belle | Vol 36 (3) 2018
This paper starts by addressing a number of common interpretations of love. Initially we recognise a conceptualisation of love as a ‘compatibility degree’, interspersed with an idyllic and rational set of ideas where the other is searched for as a duplicate of the self. We contradict this mindset by formulating an alternative that is primarily backed up by elements of the Graphe, where the emphasis is put on the interplay between lack and desire. In our effort we create space for an idea of love where tragedy can be reintroduced and hereby demonstrate facets like difference, subversion and incalculability. The theory is subsequently given a vivid and human illustration because different myths and a parable lend themselves excellently towards this task. The figurehead of the interplay between lack and desire is to be found in the parable of Samson.
