Vol 36 (2) 2018
The joke of psychoanalysis – Slavoj Žižek
Lacan’s object small a: an elephant in the room – Jeroen Sollie
The crack in the image: Virginia Woolf and Jacques Lacan on the limits of personality and the emergence of subjectivity – Alexander Venetis MA
Is life but a Pascalian dream? A commentary on Lacan’s louvain lecture – Dominiek Hoens
Black Mirror: from Lacan’s lathouse to Miller’s speaking body – Isabel Millar
The joke of surplus-value and the guffaw of the saint – Dries Dulsster
The joke of surplus-value and the guffaw of the saint
Today, society is driven by capitalist discourse, which profoundly affects our way of life. In this article we discuss how, from an analytic viewpoint, we can respond to this. According to Lacan, the psychoanalyst will offer a way out of the capitalist discourse by...
Black Mirror: from Lacan’s lathouse to Miller’s speaking body
This paper mobilizes the concepts of the lathouse and the alethosphere and re-examines them in light of Jacques-Alain Miller’s clinical developments of the later Lacan and the new symptoms as described by his clinic of the Speaking Body. As predicted by Lacan in the...
Is life but a Pascalian dream? A commentary on Lacan’s louvain lecture
This article provides a detailed commentary on Lacan’s statement that “death belongs to the realm of faith” and relates it to a dream discussed briefly yet repeatedly in his work. This nightmare by one of his patients is qualified by Lacan as ‘Pascalian’, which allows...
The crack in the image: Virginia Woolf and Jacques Lacan on the limits of personality and the emergence of subjectivity
What is the difference between personality and subjectivity? Are there disciplinary and aesthetic delimitations of both concepts? And if so, what do they look like? These questions are underlying the argument of this paper. In looking for answers, the author turns to...
Lacan’s object small a: an elephant in the room
This paper investigates the key question in Žižek’s article “The joke of psychoanalysis”, published in this edition of Psychoanalytische Perspectieven. This key question concerns what Lacan saw as the fundamental distinction between psychology and psychoanalysis,...
The joke of psychoanalysis
Lacan's notion of "objet a" designates the paradox of an object which gives body to a surplus over all determinate objects, an object which gives body to a lack constitutive of desire. What happens with this object at the end of the psychoanalytic treatment? The text...