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ARCHIVE - 09/24/08 - 02/06/09 • I uploaded an actual pig with lipstick at the Operation Castration - I still think it’s a miracle when I succeed - let me tell you succes is never the first time I try
• okay, goodnight everyone • Is this your garden through your window, Sol? your Spring beautiful garden where we can also see in reflection the light under which you work inside the house, in the room…? • I love, love the color red of the window wood, my floors have that same color red… • A ‘conversation’ about windows began with Gerard Wajcman, who has too little available in English • What a surprise! It worked.. • lamp reflection on the window glass sits in the place of the moon… is that your garden. Sol? • I hadn’t noticed the reflection until you mentioned it violet.Yes, that’s my garden. The house is set back from the street. • Place and (also) the body • What was always on the cards with the symposium, was the idea that we have a life, not just a work (and reading). Will you be inviting us for strawberries and cream and cool beer in the spring? Would bring my video camera… • … but its spring already there, the strawberries will be ready in the summer… (?) • Not in NY… all I have is a bow window where I put hanging plants—and herb plants, since it is close to the kitchen. I have a big garden though in Buenos Aires, I go there in the summer, the winter down there, a mild one, very nice, there I have a garden with huge, tall trees… also there is a lot of Lacan down there, in Spanish • Sure Chris, we can all meet here, but we would have to work though I would rather meet in Buenos Aires or just in here • So, we have to work in Australia or its the country of a thousand analysts or its here (again) ? • here again! • Found, what I thought was, exciting clip from video called ‘nummer acht’ by artist, Guido van der Werve at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eRRLk7ViJs&feature=related A play on miracles and seasons I suppose posting video clips could be possible soon • Reminds me of the big boat in the sand in Pirates of the Carribean 3Chris, you can down- and up-load videos via imageshack, but don’t ask me how.. • Chris, it’s beautiful, wish I could upload it. With videos, Shack needs Explorer 6 or Firefox for Windows, which I don’t happen to have… we use Macs • Has anyone watched Wall-E? The object of desire, Evie (sp?) looks like a Mac Wall-E deals with shit, makes neat little cubes of it. Evi is searching for signs of life on another, old, planet. Then, when she finds one, she shuts down it’s very romantic. • I saw it Sol, so romantic I agree, if Evie looks like a Mac? maybe, perhaps in that it is a very friendly human machine
• From time to time symposium and messageboard seem to be two conversations, but sometimes perhaps there’s the possibility that they are radically different (or can be radically different). I feel pushed back from something I can know about in the zone called the messageboard and have been instead looking at Alenka Zupancic’s discussion of ’cause’ (in ‘Why Psychoanalysis’) - and was struck by a few sentences. I’m thinking of what can said about art and in particular, what can be said about a messageboard photograph, but have in mind another conversation which treats cause or the cause of art (even) in a different way. I have the feeling that I’m probably heading from frying pan to fire, but the author quotes Lacan (p.36): ‘Il n’y a de cause que de ce qui cloche’, which she translates as ‘there is but the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up’. Later Zupancic writes (p.48): ‘The crucial moment of ’separation’ involved in psychoanalysis should be understood in this sense: not as simple separation from the Other, from all symbolic structures and the social mediation of the subject’s being, but as the separation of the Other from the object that drives its structure’. I don’t know quite why I’m submitting these sentences. • So for the cause of that which does not work, or which does not add up… if it is the objet a hidden cause of the desire, it’s separation from the Other is what allows for the change of cause and the difference in the “driving of the structure.” With Lacan, distinct than with Freud, the cause may change — thus the difference in the driver and driving of the structure • At the end of her book, the author talks of the ‘real of castration’ in terms of an anxiety which fears there is no castration. • key thing with anxiety is that it has an object… would Zupanki’s ‘real of castration’ comprise the case of a patient whose anxiety derives from dreams of seeing numbers to no end? and is the object “fear” — call it jouissance — that there is no castration, or is castration itself the object? • Yes, perhaps wondered something similar too. If Zupancic shifts an emphasis re castration, perhaps she shifts emphasis away from (what might be) a foreclosing of castration (with psychosis, eg.) to the function of the analyst’s desire … - to issues surrounding ‘negative transference’ etc • a foreclosing of castration (with psychosis, eg.) is a different thing… if the name of the father doesn’t get imprinted there is no law, there is no Other, how can there even be separation… the psychotic stays linked up to the mother’s voices, and this is not the M(Other) • Yes, but we are talking about what might be the case with the real of castration and I think Zupancic refers to difficulties surrounding concepts of castration. With psychosis the symbolic tends towards the real, but this surely doesn’t mean that the symbolic (or metaphor) doesn’t exist for the psychotic. Doesn’t ‘ordinary psychosis’ changes the picture in this respect? To go back to the real of castration, I think Zupacic points to castration as problematic in some ways. Could it be that men and women view castration differently - with anxiety concerning ‘lack of castration’, more likely, felt by women? In another new book by the same author on comedy, she refers to comedy’s beginnings linked to processions where large phalluses were carried, which hopefully had to do with ’symbolic castration’ rather than a castration in the real … • men and women view castration differently for sure, with women there’s nothing there to cut out… and nothing is lacking from a woman with the game of love though I certainly have something that can fill in your lack, and I am devoid of something which makes me need you… but it is not true! and where do you locate circumcision? is the fact that it cuts the body involving castration in the real? • I was thinking awhile ago about different languages. When a child has parents who have two different languages, and the child knows one better than the other.. well this was the case with me.. as a child I remember thinking ‘I can’t say what I have to say’ this is the castration implicit in speaking and being, but to avoid it, I wished: ‘if only I knew my father’s language I would be able to say what I have to say’ and so this is something about sexuality too Instead of becoming resigned to this inability I imagined that there was a way beyond it, if only my father would pass it on, transmit it. • not being able to say certainly lies in concern with castration in speaking, in being — and could your father hear what you had to say, even about it? • well alice, that is a bit of a long question.. • So, is castration a gap between symbolic and real? The conversation above reminds me of Lacan’s ‘half saying’, which is not the same as hearing two languages as a child. What crops up for me, I think, in clinical work and my own writing, are elements left out in a story or account. That is wanting somehow to tell a story, leaving out various bits, but wanting it to work regardless, despite this being next to impossible. Its as if acknowledging the Other also involves acknowledging the Other’s censure. This makes sense when the work finds its way into a public setting, with publication or an exhibition text, but something else perhaps happens in the privacy of sessions (with repression …). • ‘That is wanting somehow to tell a story, leaving out various bits, but wanting it to work regardless, despite this being next to impossible’that is a good way of saying this Chris.. • the quasi-mythic zero-level of the direct contact between the symbolic and the real coincides with the moment of their differentiation - the rise of the symbolic, the emergency of the primary battery of signifiers, whose obverse (negative) is the expulsion of the pre-symbolic Real. When the Wolfman at the age of 1, observed his parents’ coitus a tergo, the event left in his mind a memory trace which was symbolized and kept there as a libidinally-neutral trace; it was only more than three years later when the Wolfman’s sexual fantasies were awakened and he was intrigued by the origin of children, that the trace was confirmed - properly historicized, activated in his personal narrative… • historization is what the psychotic cannot do - yes the “primary” symbolization, “the emergency of the primary battery of signifiers…” much as it precedes the subjective engagement missing in psychosys • the putting a story, a history, together over time a putting in order in the clinic, with someone psychotic, and being a reference point, one that remembers and marks, points of their story, the present, and limits, I think this what is meant by a prothesis in Lacan? The challenge is not being, or not acting as an all-knowing one. not being in the real place.. • I wanted to say something about what comes to be called ‘extraordinary psychosis’ and ‘ordinary psychosis’, but want to say that art in its ‘broadest sense’, surely supplements memory and retroactive processes to remind us sometimes that we may or may not be able to talk about a history. What really is ‘historization’ ? What is it when it doesn’t happen ? Jo Bueys called his first exhibition, at the age of six, a field of cows. • Violet, when I thought about what I’d said above, (your) ‘historization’ turned into ‘hysterization’ (and assailed by a S1) - I went back to a conversation about castration • but it’s a good question Chris: “What really is ‘historization’ ? What is it when it doesn’t happen ?”I think it is nachtraglichkeit - afterwardness - when something becomes ‘true’ by saying in retrospect and there is an aboutness about yourself beyond the ego/imaginary but what really is it? and what is it when it doesn’t happen? and how is the not happening related to castration or not and how does hysteric-ization put it in place it is a really good question • um, what is the term of Freud’s between the body and the psyche? the moment of the drive what alice refers to as the confirmation of the trace..perhaps this must relate to the moment/possibility of the ’subjective engagement’ ?? • In a short text called ‘Pass Bis’ Jacques Alain Miller writes: ”If Lacan says ‘hystorisation with a y’, its because its not a mater of objectivization. Its also a theatre. It’s a matter of how, in my analysis, I came to be making meaning out of the real, and therefore, by necessarily filling in on occasion the holes the different bits, so as to get, at the end of the day, a round of applause.’ He’s talking about ‘the pass’, but also about a process which he calls ‘the pass bis’. When an analysis is necessarily finite, there follows a transference to psychoanalysis (and perhaps, hystorisation rather than historization). I can’t do arrows with my laptops but JAM writes: The Pass (arrow) from the transferential unconscious to the real unconscious Pass Bis (arrow) from the unconscious to the transferential unconscious • last line of 43 should be ‘from the transferential unconscious …’ and second line ‘by neccessarily filling in on occasion the holes that separate the different bits …’ - sorry • 43 last line should be: ‘Pass Bis (arrow) from the real unconscious to the transferential unconscious’ - Sorry, will go away and do 100 lines • what is Bis? • I could have googled it, so I did, and got: Definition: (adv) - (music) repeat, again, encore; (address) ½, a À la fin du concert, le groupe a joué deux bis - At the end of the concert, the group played two encores Il habite 43 bis, rue verte. - He lives at 43½ (or 43a) Green Street un itinéraire bis - detour, diversion • Well searched Sol. I take it that the work of an analysis comes to an end but afterwards there’s - once more - a shift in the direction of a transference to the unconscious, once more a ‘hystorization’ - so, perhaps this is why Lacanians also concern themselves with a politics, as with defending practice against state regulation, CBT etc. - and broader implications of psychoanalysis … • I appreciate the movement, somewhere written as from the work of transference to the transference to work. So you make a scene, some meaning, a symptom and name, within the transference, for your analyst. But then you traverse, your fantasy, but sometimes I think just the space between the couch and the analyst, and he is not there, he dissolves, or disappears, or falls through, and you are left with the sand and no clock for it to run through. So then if you ask how can you return to the couch now, completely alone, when your feet are sand and how do you walk, you have to make up a new way of love and again somehow make another transference. But why it might be interpreted as the transferential and real unconscious, I don’t know. To me it seems that it is still the unconscious, but a difference in position or elaboration of it. This page is to be about art, and I guess there might be an art to that process. But I wonder about artists who make art, but not for someone. Muse-less artists. If there is such a person. • maybe it is salt, not sand, because you turn around, like Lot’s wife • We might say that there’s consistency somewhere, but I think the question might be; how do we talk about art or how does Art do the talking? So (in the first place) a transference to art (we are talking about art), then (with Art talking) perhaps a question or two about objects … ? I think with muses, there’s the question of collaborations in art. The artist tires of the silence of the drives and wants something like the ‘Pass Bis’, hystorization and signs of life. Art wants to carry on talking, looking, letting it all out, having babies … • Sol, re the real unconscious; we were talking here or next door about a concern for how sessions ended and how these endings can have to do with objects, specific objects. So, my thought is, could this be one instance of how work moves away from transference issues? I wish I could arrows with my keyboard. • … if I could do arrows I’d fire them at Lot’s lampshade • Sol, I wonder about this question about artists who work without a muse. It might have been a forum topic when we thought about using forums here, but we could use the above long lost forum to produce a little online art mag and start somehow with your question or something like this … ? What might make this interesting is somehow subverting symposium form for a bit … ? • Thanks Chris for writing about this paper, and thanks admin for sending it. I just read The Second Pass, it’s a very powerful piece. In the first place the second pass is written as having three parts ad this is particular to the transference to work, or analysis:, ‘from the real unconscious to the transferential to the transferential unconscious’ later, the middle, the ‘to the transferential’ is taken out. This part is evocative for me • (response to message 40 on messageboard) The Badiou notion comes across in the form of (an ‘affirmation’) in a manifesto, but when ‘to work officially in the visibility of what the West declares to exist’ is tied to the effects of the gaze in seminar X1, we’re also tied to a jouissance that precludes a subjectivity, which, I think, Lacan calls ‘looking’ in that seminar. To take something from Malengreau’s sentence, it seems a contingency is needed to lessen the jouissance of the art world. I’m not taking time to explain myself, but my question has to do with contingencies and Badiou’s sentence. Should we say that by contextualizing the work of art, most likely the work will not be seen, or shown or even made, in a conventional sense? In recent years, Walter Benjamin has made some sense to some artists, and his ‘Angelus Novus’, from ‘On the Concept of History’, feels like a premonition. Particularly the last few lines. Summing up an inability to learn from history or past mistakes seems pertinent to a worldwide ’state of emergency.’ If the work of art has a function ‘at times like these’ we might want to find a contingency that transcends rhetoric and what the situationists called the ‘organization of appearances’. What follows is Benjamin’s short text: ‘There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees a single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.’ • the Paul Klee painting is at • and Laurie Anderson made a song of that Benjamin extract.. a beautiful song too, do you know it? • no don’t know it, but will try to find it … • Laurie Anderson: The Dream BeforeHansel and Gretel are alive and well And they’re living in Berlin She is a cocktail waitress He had a part in a Fassbinder film And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin And she says: Hansel, you’re really bringing me down And he says: Gretel, you can really be a bitch He says: I’ve wasted my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love was the wicked witch. She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Progress • Is this the Laurie Anderson song? so nice! • Have just looked at JAM’s ‘Other Side of Lacan’ in new LacInk and found in this text what seem to be similar concerns to ‘Pass Bis’ or ‘Second Pass’. I read it for the first time, so tired I couldn’t make notes, but thought I’d trust ‘One-Body’ to dreams. There’s again the play of hysterization/hystorization and first thing in the morning, have forgotten most of what the text is saying, but there is an insistence on live sessions. Miller writes: One understands that this is what the human being must bring to analysis. After all, if there is only speech involved, one would not see why the telephone or Internet couldn’t be appropriate media. The analytic experience requires the giving the body a function more important than that which psychoanalysis so conceived from the symbolic’. I went to the Paris (English language) seminar in July and was struck by a desire that propelled some people attending across continents and found out that an analysis sometimes requires a globetrotting commitment. Since then, as before, I’ve carried on wondering about a relationship of ‘city profession’ and contemporary art. Its a chance connection (that fixes me a little), but having slept on JAM’s text, I remember Badiou’s suggestion that contemporary art might be subordinate to psychoanalysis and Marie Helene Brousse’s notion that the artist somehow leads the analyst. I wonder how, but also think Miller’s texts have taken me back passed a territory where contemporary art makes sense and no sense at all. I remember what it felt like at art school in London, just a few years after May ‘68, when, for example, in a heated meeting just prior to events that stopped the school, a young women refused to explain herself. I’m thinking of Miller’s ‘real unconscious’ …… but still subject to a need to explain something, there’s still a sense I have of what art brings to situations - like a desire to cross continents in search of an analysis. Miller makes live sessions sensible, but artists have always linked into a presence that also makes demands on the body. Subsequently, it seems contemporary art may have something to say about the reluctance of a city profession, whereas psychoanalysis may have something to say about castration and ‘names’ in the art world … • In her abstract for the paper she’s to present at the upcoming conference of the newly formed New Zealand Centre for Lacanian Analysis: ‘The 21stCentury and its discontents’ Lucille Holmes writes: “on the basis of the Lacanian proposition that the work of art occupies the place of the analyst….the art work would ‘take place’ within the gap created by the loss of the object, enabling a displacement of knowledge and a failure of meaning attributable to the aesthetic as such..” She is writing, I think from, among others, a perspective of art education. But I think she says something about what art sometimes brings to situations.. • yes that’s the Anderson song violet it goes well with the Klee print • A little perverse perhaps, I’m thinking psychoanalysis can be art’s object (muse) and am wondering what JAM’s journey passed the real unconscious does for (with) the sinthome. My would-be construction can be tied to Badiou’s affirmation and ‘It is better to do nothing’ can be linked to the effects of the gaze: the mortifying gaze of the twentieth century (as with Angelus Novus). And with the gaze, the real traces the hollow of castration, anticipating transference to the unconscious (or to art). But can the ‘inexistence’ that Badiou traces be both the desire of the analyst and of contemporary art? And if it is (in some way), does the desire of art rescue Joyce from the sinthome (in the Badiou sense that art is somehow subordinate to psychoanalysis)? With this dense construction, which does its best to follow ‘Pass Bis’ and ‘One-body’ dreams, there’s also the madness of contemporary art. A madness that rest a strategy close to the real (unconscious), wary of castration. In this sense, it’s worth asking what making a name in the world of contemporary art involves. Did Joseph Beuys sometimes make the mistake of believing he was Joseph Beuys? Clearly he did and this may have been part of a Beuys wager, but Badiou’s affirmation reworks the function of art. What can art do now? Does Badiou look towards a new ethics? Badiou’s sentence is ‘It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent’. • - am conflating (Badiou’s) Empire and the gaze • I should have written the above as a matheme, not that I could, but think there being, in a sense, two passes for contemporary art, implies looking again at the sinthome and what’s meant by the function of art: that is, looking towards an art that forces passed the names of Empire • I’m going to post this from July 2007Branch dark breaking back bank and bank burning water chink break those dreams tonight • I’m wondering why only Sol and I have gone for thumbnail signature images accompanying comments, but also why there’s no such option here? I guess it happened by chance. • indeed the thumbnail signature images accompanying comment in the messageboard happened by accident. We couldn’t get rid of them. Now that you managed to put something in there I like them • Me too … • I have in mind blundering into what I know little about next door (messageboard, comments 108/9), so want to head on quickly hoping no one will notice … I shouldn’t have mentioned Lacan’s two clinics, but imaging the first may have to do with an Oedipal drama and the second, strands from a piece by Eva Hesse; I want to ’say something’ about a trauma that constitutes the work of art moving away from technique (and mastery), at least since Bloomsday. With a bit of luck I’ll trip over my socks here too! Until recently, it seems, money made the world go around and now we’re not so sure and there is what remains of an art world vision of things tied to technique when it falters and financial absolution. There was a beautiful moment, I thought, when Ann next door recently mentioned costs and the analyst who ‘acts with his/her being’. Is there a link here, can I stick one together? The link is clear to me (at least for a few moments). If analysis involves a cost and I’ve heard many arguements in support of adequate fees etc. - what is the case with art? If the work of art has to push passed Badiou’s notion of ‘inexistence’, we seem to be trampling in the direction of the artist as an exemption where costs are concerned. It seems Tarkovsky’s last film bears the name of a symptom expressed in interviews previously. • yeah your messing up but socks don’t get in the way very much. unless they belong to.. i can’t think of what the big difference is between ordinary and extraordinary except when you cant concentrate. or condense, now that i can’t understand except for in a manner of listening too much . is there ever too much? yes wreckless • We’ve been talking about extraordinary and ordinary psychosis next door, but I have to say that I sometimes have difficulty with (some) work surrounding Lacan/Joyce, despite there being many exciting implications. In a text called ‘Lacan with Joyce’, Jacques Alain Miller talks about language and trauma. He says, ‘the true traumatic kernel is not the seduction, the threat of castration, the observation of coitus, nor even the transformation of the status of all this into a fantasy, it is not the Oedipus or castration. The true traumatic kernel is the relation to language.’ • I tend to agree with luckyand chris sands’ last sentence • to be specific, (and fair, which is nothing) lucky’s second sentence • But how do we begin to look at the effect of the A-father or knowledge in a clinical setting or in politics without a sense that there may be some difference? I imagine there may be implications, for example; if ‘ordinary psychosis’ is ordinary, does this presuppose a new political discourse is urgent? Is ‘ political spin’ simply an unfortunate way of dealing with ideology, when it looks like ‘too much knowing’? … • I think there is difference for sure between one person and the next, more than between one ‘type’ of psychosis and the next.. that’s all • Was thinking about the place of knowledge in a clinical setting and implications of ordinary psychosis in the wide world and consistency where being misunderstood’s concerned. • • is it the year of the horse or the snake or there are many others to choose from, no no no no no… well it must be happy.. with lots of bills • I wonder what year it is? Do you mean ‘bills’ lucky, as in ‘to pay’? I have just left some of mine in the letterbox (disavowal) • i searched it it is the year of the ox, good listeners, my first meaning were dollar bills and then followed the other kind and on top of that bird bills • Well happy year of the ox to you, lucky, and best wishes for sufficient dollar bills, many singing bird bills, and less of the other kind! Comment by lucky — December 31, 2008 @ 12:32 am • • For some reason I think I can say this without constructing much of an argument. It has to do with what I see as Badiou’s challenge. This ‘challenge’ can be found in Badiou’s references to contemporary art, particularly the fifteenth of Badiou’s 15 theses for contemporary art (https://www.lacan.com/frameXXIII7.htm). If Badiou talks of negotiating his way passed Lacan, this may sometimes be the case for the artist and for contemporary art. But how? If a paper like ‘Interpretation in Reverse’ situates the analysand’s work, can it also site the work of art in a world lacking ‘new signifiers’? If as Badiou suggests, the work of art is subordinate to psychoanalysis, can the work start with the place of the analysand - without the analyst? And, if so, what of ‘new signifiers’ (in a world of art) in a world of editors, assistants and guardians of a precious subjectivity? • “……can the work start with the place of the analysand - without the analyst?” Is there “the place” of the analysand - without the analyst? • This is a supposition and it supposes the work of art making do, as it must, without the analyst. • I don’t think a work of art can be in the place of the analysand - excepting that it can be homeless • Then how is art homeless? For the work of art, can’t psychoanalysis already be the event that locates a question? Were you thinking about Joyce and exile? • homeless art doesn’t seem out of the question the way it is out of the picture. • How can an analysand be homeless? Maybe not in the same way, but still.. • Sol, how does the question of the homeless analysand relate to your messageboard question about in-patient services - or clinics even? Could it be, the analysand squats in what was once the analyst’s consulting room: a return to what Agamden calls ‘bare life’, with the analysand sleeping under the couch in a room without services … ? The room is not abandoned. Instead, this is England post 2011, when the term ‘psychoanalyst’ can no longer be used. From time to time, the analyst (or psychotherapist now), wearing dark glasses, visits the old room, sits on the couch, talks about pressures that come with state regulation … • Oh, good connection!Beautiful image!The idea of having no place came up a lot early in my analysis, and then recently I read a paper, I think it was by Miller, though i can’t recall, in which the writer described every analysand as ‘homeless’ that is, by implication, not recognising that they resided on the other side, in the uncs, elsewhere. Art, sometimes, in its proliferation, has no place, there is no time for it, and it is not recognised, or does not even know itself when/ as coming from the other side. So it might try to speak but fail. And failing, i think, after Freud, is always a most important thing. Because a home can be made from it. • I used to think a lot of that saying ‘dumb as a painter’ and wonder about at least two meanings of that saying. Are others familiar with it? or is it local? • I don’t know it, but apart from this appreciate what you are saying • ive never heard it but it brings a few vthings to mind • dumb as unable to speak may well fit a number of painters, while you struggle to interview them — I agree.Comment by alice — January 16, 2009 @ 2:20 pm and as in not speaking might relate to the symposium and teh messageboard sometimes, but not deaf I think • Have been in hospital 8 days and so much trauma sticks to this strange environment. I had an operation, but much more follows this: shocking dependency, getting used to the idea of tubes coming out of me, a cycle of morphine and anti nausea drugs, illness all around - and what little say we might (one day) eventually have re. questions surrounding our own mortality. There is much to explore, but home now, I remember thinking jouissance shrunk for a while, was no longer some kind of universal; there was no jouissance, but perhaps, with a bit of luck, I can say more about this in coming weeks … • Good gracious, Chris Sands, pobrecito, such a bad thing to go through, Oh I’m so sorry for you……..hope everything gets much better at home, no jouissance? no enjoyment of the pain? GET BETTER, BETTER, BETTER, VERY SOON! • i second that! • I’m very glad you’ve returned and got through the operation at least. Welcome back. You can see how quiet it’s been without you! Take care Chris and hope you have something replenishing- some good food, something consoling to read, or whatever works for you. keep us updated • thanks xxx I want to try to say something about an experience of trauma, which Lacan describes somehow as a separation of body and jouissance. I remember thinking about Gerard Wajcman’s wonderful ‘Intime’ texts a few days after my operation, thinking a ‘looking in’ can only turn toward ‘looking out’ (with trauma). Just before I left, I saw an old man propped up in bed. His eyes were closed (some time) after an operation and his difficult breathing seemed all that remained. All that was left of his lungs, seemed like some last flower looking out in the direction of burnished light. In this sense, trauma seems to punctuate Wajcman’s world of interiors, pose a limit, rather like the end of a session. If ‘Intime’ is indicative of a concern for interiors in contemporary art, the session ends somehow and we move away from the delirium of everyday life, but (with its punctuation) trauma seems more than the steadfast imagery of news bulletins • Chris Sands, in hospitals there are terrible visions which help think what you have is nothing in comparison………… I was in the hospital some years ago, because of an accident with fire, the man the next room, an asiatic man, had the police at his door ready to take him as soon as he was better. He had spilled gazoline on the wife and lit her up, but the wife before dying threw at him what was left of gasoline in the pot — she certainly had her vengeance….. I won’t describe what was left of the man that was going to jail…are you getting better CS……? • The medical model is often seen as problematic in the context of so called mental health issues, but it is surprisingly problematic on ‘home turf’. Nowhere is talking more important than in hospitals I’d say but am getting a little better, day by day. • was it a little hospital, nearby where you live? or did you have to travel to somewhere where no one knew your name? Did someone speak with you? was tehre an angel there? • how can there be an angel if he lost the jouissance? • Didn’t see angels in hospital (Sol), but it’s a nice idea. Lacan used the make up of the French word ‘ange’ to make a connection with the word ‘etranger’ - ’stranger’ ‘foriegner’ . So, etre-ange, to be an angel is also to be a stranger. All very ‘Wings of Desire’! It was my local hospital, which is a hospital for 100k people, so not too small, but I was there during a flu epidemic, which meant the hospital was overfull and many nurses and doctors were off ill. There was talking to other patients when I felt up to it and I had many visitors, but the situation during this epidemic, I suppose, meant staff had no time to take patients through what was happening. This passage for the patient seems very importan as serious illness is very frightening. The idea of an angel’s jouissance is a bit ‘Wings of Desire’ too. With this Wenders film set in Berlin, an angel falls in love with an acrobat, so has to give up on his immortality. In this sense, angels (in general) might be addicted to immortality or they contend like ‘Angelus Novus’ with history. However, there is point with illness, I think, when jouiissance is not possible. Lacan refers to a ‘traumatism’ which is somehow reached looking back, through a nachträglichkeit, but the moment of trauma is not the same as the moment in a session. Could we say it’s a real devoid of jouissance? and if so, talking supplements the medical model in a crucial way. • Maybe, i don’t know, maybe there was an angel and Chris forgot for a moment, maybe there wasn’t. Usually they (hospitals, as a patient) are like a layer of hell so a tiny encounter can be very powerful. I was just hoping for Chris. But home is better, I’m glad. • Thanks Sol, yes home is better. Have been looking at a fascinating paper by Alenka Zupancic, called ‘the Fifth Condition’. It’s in a book called ‘Think Again’ (’Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy’) edited by Peter Hallward. Zupancic writes: ‘Philosophy is work that takes place at a distance from its conditions, yet within the realm of these conditions’. (194) And, ‘In his book on Saint Paul, Badiou points out how names that designate four generic procedures are being systematically replaced by other names which aim at effacing the procedures of truth involved in them: culture instead of art, technique instead of science, management instead of politics, sexuality instead of love.’ (194). Concerning representation the author says, ”Gerard Wajcman was right when he defined the central problem of modern art as follows: ‘How to find access to the world in some way than through image? How to aim at the world, at the real, without at the same time interposing the screen of representation.’ (198) Towards the end of the paper, Zupancic says why Lacan’s ’signifier represents a subject for another signifier’ represents ‘a major breakthrough of contemporary thought. • yes i know a son teenager, who hates his mother and does not want to talk or hear about anything with his mother . But sex yes that he wants to talk about. • CS - Yes, Zupancic’s lines may well interpret Wajcman’s “How to find access to the world in some way than through the image…” ——Lacan’s signifier — an image — “represents a subject” for another signifier (an image). That’s how Lacan called signifiers angels - more specifically the ones that have no body… they are but a head with wings - they come in pairs -> new meaning (the subject of the uncs.) • Zupancic refers to ‘counting for two’ (re. the question of representation and presentation, a breakthrough) … but this image of the subject of the unconscious looks like it might be the other side of the headless drive. Going back to trauma and a hospital experience, it seems that in separating jouissance from a real (of trauma), I’d let go of the relationship between symbolic and real - and Zupancic’s text insists on a knotting of representation and presentation, for Badiou’s philosophy (and a set of conditions) and for the work of art. • a very smart remark CS, about the headless and the body-less… with Lacan the body-less should come first I guess, then the headless is informed, right? • What I found particularly interesting about Zupancic’s text was sense that, with the work of art, representation and presentation are never separate, rather like the symbolic and the real. Psychoanalysis is, I think, seen as a ‘truth procedure’ for the ‘condition’, love, which is one of Badiou’s four conditions for philosophy. Perhaps I’m labouring a text which is only available in newly released ‘Think Again’ edited by Peter Hallward, but I thought the chapter had much to say. • i seem to be missing the implication. i would see them of course as never separate, representation and presentation. wouldn’t that be why there is what doesn’t exist in art world. i’m thinking of badiou and zizek references to the inexistent or invisible. i’m still wondering what would be the other side of drive, the headless one cs refered to. does it have anything to do with the way appearance is cracked? i mean is it this gap? • i looked back and saw what cs said, oops it had slipped by my mind. • the headless one CS referred to is the drive - with Lacan “acephalic” knowledge…Even though it is nonsubjectivized it brings about satisfaction - this knowledge is not related to truth. • Alice, I find there’s something difficult at the end of 120. Surely the subject of the Freudian unconscious is never free of the drive. Is there a dream which doesn’t involve the drives? If we look for the Freudian unconscious in the hole between ‘I told you so’ and ‘what I heard you say’, in between signifiers, can we see the drive in a series of effects; in terms of the consequences of what we do? So, is the drive linked to an action, to an act? Is ‘acephalic knowledge’ any less the knowledge of angels? • CS……. there is the acephallic linked to “A child is being beaten” which, as Freud stresses is so radically unconscious that it cannot ever be remembered: • I have difficulty with that sequence somehow, but surely there’s no equating what you call ‘radically unconscious’ with the drive … ? • an “acephalic,” non-subjectivized knowledge: the fact that this phase will never have a real existence calls upon the status of the real –its inference “desubjectivizes” me, i.e., — I can only assume my fundamental fantasy insofar as I undergo “subjective destitution.” CONTINUE |
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