by Rishab Nathan | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025
Abstract: This paper reflects on the complex interplay between societal crises, practical solutions, and philosophical thought, questioning the prevailing approaches to addressing systemic issues. Engaging with thinkers of continental philosophy and the psychoanalytic tradition, this text critiques the endless pursuit of solutions, arguing that this practical drive may contribute to the persistence of societal problems. Instead, the essay advocates for a shift in focus: understanding the importance of theory, but paradoxically, only as a form of practice. By exploring the theory/practice divide, this paper attempts to reframe the duality into something new.
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 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.
by Jens De Vleminck | Vol 30 (3) 2012
This contribution proposes that Freud, in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915c), develops a separate metapsychology of hate for the first time. Freud does not only distinguish hate from sadism and masochism, but also renounces his former opinion about hate as a transformation of love. We analyse Freud’s views on hate in line with his “The Disposition to Obsessional Neurosis” (1913i) and according to the matrix of obsessional neurosis. We also draw attention to the constitutive importance of the ego-development and the ego-instincts as put forward in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914c). In this way Freud’s plea for an original hate is one of the rare locations in the Freudian corpus where there is room for an original, non-sexual aggressivity.
