Approaching the Impossible

Working with psychic suffering one is often confronted with feelings of impotence. Yet this is not a necessary consequence of the impossibility proper to the professions of educating, analysing or governing. Throughout the essays of Imre Kertész, the impossibility – or the unthinkable – is conceived of as proper to the relation between experience and language. A specific example is encountered in what is called the negative experience. Speaking and writing are treated as two distinct possibilities in the encounter with the impossible.

Creating Space for the Encounter: Meeting the Impossible
The movement called Institutional Psychotherapy is grounded in the ongoing effort to install the necessary conditions of possibility for the liberation of the clinic from alienation. To care for psychotic and other suffering people, we need to create a supportive transferential field in which the human encounter is essential. This touches the Real and makes possible, in a moment of crisis, a transformation of the position of the Subject. The Collective, the pathic sculpting of the space-between-people, allows for the…
Mathematical realism and the impossible structure of the real
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…
Psychoanalysis and Modernity
This article gives a rough sketch of psychoanalysis as part of modern culture (modernity) and as participating in the problematic of modern culture (modernity). It starts from the present day lack of interest in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is minimally defined by its concern for human experience, dividedness and conflict and for the maintenance of a lack. Present day culture can be described by a prevalence of instrumentalism, narcissism and the practice of a culture of immediacy. It can be interpreted in…

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