The language of violence

This article deals with the question of violence within the context of a school. The central idea is that a tension exists between an experience and the language for that experience, an idea which is brought to the fore by both Freud and the Russian psychologist Vygotsky. Violence is considered as the expression of a missed meeting between experience and language. By means of a number of psychoanalytic concepts this idea is developed and illustrated with a clinical fragment.

Violence and Discourse
Using Lacan's notion of capitalist discourse, the author provides support for the comprehension of actual discontent in our civilisation, for the "new symptoms" and for new forms of violence. Capitalist discourse substitutes the normative function of the law with the ideology of liberty. But the liberated man is isolated and his freedom is deceptive: he is increasingly dependant on the consumption of objects that provide him with a plus-de-jouir. A purely capitalist discourse is nothing but an ultraliberal utopia and…
On bilingualism and the language of the unconscious
In psychoanalysis, as the talking cure, language asserts itself pre-eminently as the mode of treatment. Formations of the unconscious, like symptoms, dreams and slips of the tongue, can be interpreted on the basis of their underlying linguistic structure. Bilingual analysands, however, possess more than one language code by means of which they can put such manifestations of the unconscious into words.. This raises the question of how the ‘language of the unconscious’ finds its expression through the discourse of the…
Lacan and Girard: sex and non-violence
This paper brings together the work of Jacques Lacan, the great Christianizer of psychoanalysis, and René Girard, the speculative anthropologist whose study of sacrifice and myth led not only to his rejection of Freud and Lacan but a dramatic conversion to Catholicism and growing conviction as to the revelatory power of the Gospels to expose the myth upon which psychoanalysis is built. Despite their antipathy I bring a psychoanalytic perspective to bear on Girard's theory, interrogating the modalities of sacrifice…

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