lacan dot com/messageboard-archive

dc - 04/20/04 15:09:53 EDT gwen, I think it depends on how you understand "structure." If you mean: structure = symbolizable, then, no, in the sense that the real is precisely what is unsymbolized, or the very kernel that gives the symbolic its very contours. But if you mean: structure = topology, then, I think somewhat yes, i.e. mathemes, objet a, as well as other graphs that Lacan gives to represent the real. One more thing, I did some thinking: apropos of ukasiac's question, to say that mathemes represent the unsymbolizable of language is not the same thing as saying it is a metalanguage. Rather, it is akin to uncovering the hidden presuppositions of language itself. To use an example, Lacan often took Greek tragedy to be giving body to something unsymoblizable in language: his reading of Antigone in Seminar VII is an attempt to show the concept of the "Ate", or as Lacan puts it, "the in between two deaths," or "symbolic death." This zone of the Ate is something that the symbolic itself has no language for, or to put it another way, the zone of the Ate, symbolic death, is the pressuposition that founds the Other. Or something like that...but in any case, though the narrative of Antigone is giving body to this idea of the Ate, it is not a metalanguage. admin - 04/18/04 21:52:32 EDT Jacques Alain Miller's photograph - in the calendar - is indeed very recent: 10 January 2004 at la Mutualité Katy - 04/18/04 21:48:39 EDT Jacques Alain Miller's photograph - in the calendar - is dated when? does somebody know? Tom - 04/18/04 12:11:05 EDT sorry, but i've just discovered this chatroom while surching information about Lacan and his religious background. In a dessertation i'm trying to discover direct connections between his theory and religions(catholicism or judaisme), like ' le nom du pere'. If anyone knows some interesting literature or more details around this subject, please send it to alcixihxan@hotmail.com. kind regards tom gwen - 04/17/04 23:19:53 EDT dc - is the real structurable? do mathemes structure the real, the way discourses structure language? apostrophe - 04/13/04 14:25:20 EDT max - No, the mathemes are not ironic. max - 04/13/04 10:35:28 EDT aren't they also ironic? "he seems to have had as much fun with his mathmes as with his witticisms." dc - 04/12/04 02:10:56 EDT My mistake, I should have said something more like: "Mathemes ARE the real of language." You are correct, they are not "representations," but simply are. To go back to Gwen's question: If I understand your question, the matheme for object a is simply "a", for example, in the matheme for fantasy ($<>a), the "a" is objet a. How do these relate? I think this goes back to my misuse of terminology, namely, mathemes do not represent the real, rather, they are the real. I think a good example would be Lacan's four discourses: when Lacan writes the four discourses they are neither a formal language (as if he is "inventing" a language) but neither are they shorthand. In a way, the four discourses are the way language as such insofar as they are discourses are structured, or in another way, the matheme for the four discourses give body to the very consistency of language. Then, when there is a shift in discourse, this shift is not talked about in language, but is simply something that happens, and as such, the matheme gives body to this shift. I hope that clarifies things. ukasiac - 04/11/04 17:24:51 EDT What, precisely, does it mean to "represent" something that cannot be symbolized? Do the mathemes then stand for some kind of metalanguage? Isn't one of his famous theses that there is no metalanguage? Gwen - 04/10/04 23:56:01 EDT in that they represent the "real" of language - something that language cannot symbolize - how do mathemes become, relate... to an object a? - 04/10/04 18:57:23 EDT The way I understand it, Lacan's mathemes are neither formal language or shorthand, they represent the "real" of language. This is to say that the matheme is something that language cannot symbolize. This is also found in his interest in Greek tragedy: there is something articulated by tragedy that language cannot symbolize. Also, his axioms are found scatter throughout this writings and Seminars. When he gives these axioms they are often italicized and he often points out that what he has just said is indeed one of his famous theses. bitter - 04/08/04 21:31:22 EDT in secondary texts Luke - 04/08/04 08:44:15 EDT I've been digging around for a thorough account of Lacan's formal language, but haven't been able to turn up anything. Are his mathemes just for the sake of a shorthand, or do they represent a complete and functional formal language? Lacan is often credited and more often detracted for his "axiomatization" of psychoanalysis. Where are these axioms gathered? C S. - 04/05/04 03:26:09 EDT chris - le justanzo and so, it (the work) keeps changing ... (but, close to its deadline and sell by date), it's looking for a voice ... le justanzo - 04/05/04 02:42:40 EDT chris - your inclination to use this text for voice over is interesting, and more interesting now that it will include this discussion of its own inception, a copy prediscursively afloat, temporally distributed, to include itself discussing itself in essence, but in prexistence in exopolis. perfume - 03/30/04 22:54:41 EST chris (uk) - am I interpreting your idea of an art and Lacan symposia? gary - 03/29/04 12:32:08 EST Alec - langauge<< ??? is this your actual way with 'emptying' language...? paul - 03/29/04 03:54:25 EST Alec - there's a lot you can read on this topic in lacanian ink 11 - on this same site http://www.lacan.com/cover11.htm Alec - 03/29/04 03:15:36 EST does anybody have any expertise by any chance; is it true the connection between Joyce and Lacan lies in the 'emptying' of langauge? chris (uk) - 03/28/04 11:34:56 EST Perfume, many thanks ... perfume - 03/28/04 10:08:47 EST chris (uk) - just give me a day or two as to get my assistant concentrate on your project and we'll do it............ chris (uk) - 03/28/04 04:11:20 EST Antonia, I think an art and Lacan symposia has sublime potential and if it can be done soon, then great! But as for video: as you know, I'm in the process of making particular video pieces and the work would be put together where I am, because at present technology limits what can be done online. However, collaborations are possible online when the work is conceptual. I keep thinking, for example, that this messageboard conversation ... as voice over ... could provide a sequence in one piece. With collaboration there's reworking and what might be called 'sublimation'. Once enough of the project I keep referring to takes shapes, I will begin putting clips onto a website, which would further possibilities for collaboration. My local sponsor sees this as art using new technology, but more importantly, it may be art using technology to provide collaboration as a new vehicle for art. Antonia - 03/27/04 14:46:02 EST chris (uk) - an art and Lacan symposia can be put up in no time... so if you want it we do it. the problem with videos however is that they take up a lot of memory, and this is how the one's in lacan.com belong to other sites - we link to them chris (uk) - 03/27/04 03:51:57 EST Antonia, In the Shortest Shadow, by Alenka Zupancic, I came across description of sublimation, which seemed pertinant to thoughts of an art and Lacan symposia subject. A Z. writes: 'Its main function is to create a stage on which these very 'obscure passions/ drives' become something valuable''. And, a new site could be a place where projects are sometimes muted, projects which have to do with 'beyond the pleasure principle' art processes ... . I prefer the notion of 'beyond the pleasure principle art' to 'Lacanian art'. I'd like to describe the project I'm working on in some detail and how this project could lead to collaboration via a symposia. After some initial funding, I'm looking at other funding possibilities and at present, it seems the work proceeds through archiving and a series of coordinates. Collaboration in a sense provides an antidote to parameters supplied by funding bodies. Which may have more to do with sublimation than an artist's avoidance of castration ... Without going into a set of coordinates presented by ongoing work, it seemed to me the messageboard ... in a short duration ... provided a backdrop to another dialogue in a video project (I'm working on). Through some reworking (and sublimation), an audio recording (sent from afar!) could be included in the film process. But this hint of collaboration via Lac. Ink only makes sense if you know what the work is ... and perhaps in the context of an art and Lacan symposia(?). chris (uk) - 03/26/04 13:07:11 EST If fact, the reference is on page 78 of Seminar X1 (Four Fundamental Concepts ...) chris (uk) - 03/26/04 05:19:52 EST ps. ooops. its seminar 11 (page 76) ... will have to find my copy and blame it on flu not an avoidance of castration if I'm wrong! chris (uk) - 03/26/04 05:14:02 EST Antonia, Maria, the paper referred to certainly concerns psychosis as a clinical structure, however, I take it, the author quotes Lacan, who is not writing about psychosis. References are paper by ED. page 8 and will look up Ecrits when possible to put Lacan's statement in context. Antonia - 03/25/04 11:42:00 EST chris (uk) - the flow of images with the psychotic "most completely eludes the term castration" since there isn't the paternal metaphore - the name of the father is not cutting the flow, the mother's desire - it didn't get imprinted. maria - 03/24/04 20:46:25 EST chris (uk) - what I read in the Elizabeth Doisneau paper speaks of psychosis, then the scopic drive lies in reference to the girl's allucinations (delusion)... I don't know that it could be the same with art. chris (uk) - 03/24/04 09:20:39 EST Artists spend a lot of time looking at what they do, not necessarily because of narcissism. Perhaps, art suspends knowing and for an artist looking at something, that knowing seems a long way off. This is linking knowledge to castration. chris (uk) - 03/24/04 08:58:30 EST Maria, check out Courtil papers and one by Elizabeth Doisneau, which are online and translated into English. There should be references. Sorry, can't do better, have got flu Maria - 03/24/04 03:43:58 EST so how does the scopic drive elude castration? where that Lacan says "it is the scopic drive that most completely eludes the term castration"? Antonia - 03/22/04 13:52:14 EST chris (uk) - what immediately came to mind are Goya's series of drawings "The Horrors of War" and the images of the Chapman Brothers about Lacan's phrase in the courtil papers, as I see it it is the moment when articulation comes in that you have castration......... you look and you look - you are searching ....... but suddenly you say "I see! " . there you go: what it means is that you are not looking anymore. chris (uk) - 03/22/04 13:16:10 EST Antonia, I'd (w'ed) want to think about an image and would love to be a coordinator, if a coordinator was needed and I knew what might be involved. In the meantime, running with this notion for a bit, I've kept in mind a phrase from a (Courtil) paper by Elizabeth Doisneau, who says, 'Lacan says it is the scopic drive Œthat most completely eludes the term castration‚'. And so perhaps, in this moment, Goya and the Chapman's come to mind again ... Antonia - 03/22/04 12:50:08 EST chris (uk) - no problem with perfume to have the "Lacan and art symposia," so we get it together: What kind of image do you suggest for the icon to have? Do you want your name as coordinator in there? what other ideas??? chris (uk) - 03/22/04 11:10:42 EST A symposia site called 'Lacan and art' could be a site where an active response to the gaze (of art) is encouraged. Where a response is not just the fact of the viewer. When a would-be collaboration is referred to, Lac. Ink might provide a conduit where details of a proposed collaboration are passed on. The messageboard is not a place for sessions or a discourse concerning art and psychoanalysis, unless it's a discourse which values the universal at the expense of the personal. Antonia - 03/22/04 09:12:39 EST chris (uk) - that's already a great remark to keep in mind: "Goya and the Chapman brothers survive in a turbulent age for one reason or another." "Antonia, I still think the messageboard could be a place where collaborations which have to do with art and psychoanalysis happen..." Like what, how? chris (uk) - 03/22/04 02:13:48 EST When something which we might call personal proceeds in the direction of the universal, it might be psychoanalysis and we assume, the work of psychoanalysis looks after the emerging subject. Here perhaps the artist takes more risks. Unless he or she knows a good Lacanian analysis, who looks after the subject as artist? Who looks after the artist (or the process of art) a hundred years after the start of Freud's discovery? Guesswork would suggest it's the same as it's always been. Goya and the Chapman brothers survive in a turbulent age for one reason or another. But is there more, since Freud and Lacan? If Lacanian Ink's position is subject to the gaze of psychoanalysis-and-art, then what's new? The messageboard can't be a session, but my question is, can we proceed from the personal to the universal, subject to the gaze of art? Is there some way the messageboard can turn into a collaboration, when there's no obvious passage from personal to universal? Perhaps, there's a new symposia item here, Lacan and art? antonia - 03/21/04 20:09:06 EST chris (uk) - the discourse in psychoanalysis is the same as the discourse in art - the non-existent psychoanalist in place of the non existent artist, in place of the non-existent work of art. Lacanian psychoanalysis can work as a collaboration with contemporary visual arts... about the messageboard being a place where collaborations which have to do with art and psychoanalysis happen tell us more... what do we need as to make it happen? and is the subject to be reinverted or reinvented? Chris (uk) - 03/21/04 17:53:14 EST A demand produces an effect in psychoanalysis, but the chatroom is not a session. Sometimes, it seems to me, this site seems like a session, but perhaps its important that its not. For me, contributing something here leads to demand. If its not a demand which leads in the direction of transference, then what is it? Demand resonates for me at the moment, not just here, of course. Here, it leads to something demanded in the context of psychoanalysis and art (and Lacanian Ink). Is the Other in psychoanalysis the same as the Other of art ? If some processes in contemporary visual arts demand collaborations, can Lacanian psychoanalysis be seen as a collaboration? Lacan makes the point that a demand is always a demand for love in psychoanalysis. When an artist repositions the gaze, 'being an artist' is already spent, but in the preceding event an artist makes demands ... ... Antonia, I still think the messageboard could a place where collaborations which have to do with art and psychoanalysis happen. But, perhaps the subject needs to be reinvented ... I'll go away and listen to the Black Eyed Peas. schnauze - 03/21/04 16:16:47 EST Our star-crossed scribners seem to be having some trouble. Could we please reinvert the subject? antonia - 03/21/04 11:23:50 EST chris (uk) - one thing is to ask, the other to say "And you never say what you write about Antonia ..." chris (uk) - 03/21/04 04:15:01 EST Antonia, of course there's no compelling if you feel no compulsion, but you once asked me something I responded to and now, your response surprises me. antonia - 03/20/04 21:09:28 EST Chris (uk) - Lacan did not bite Melanie Klein to take this chunk - he took it and he expounded it... the effect of mutilation - part body - he ties to the sexual. I don't HAVE to say what I write about... more so since I am not compelling anyone to say whom or what they write about. Chris (uk) - 03/20/04 02:54:21 EST Antonia, isn't this Jacques L. taking a chunk out of Melanie K? Later on, surely Lacan acknowledges the real of the body. My reference to addiction was reference to the encore of the drives (even the oral drive), but there was also reference to the jouissance of writing and thoughts I have about my use of this site. It seems to me that Lacanian therapy is often problematic in the context of mainstream mental health because it incorporates the notion of paternal function. I f Lacanian art exists, it may be 'problematic' because it too resists an unknowing substitute for the paternal signifier. When I suggest this site could be more than chat, its because Lacanian desire counters jouissance. And collaborations in new art, sometimes, consciously challenge the jouissance of tried relationships, sometimes with a little Lacanian desire! And you never say what you write about Antonia ... antonia - 03/19/04 11:55:03 EST chris (uk) - you are getting more and more intriguing... where are you mentioning addiction? in any case oral drive is already in the mammal complex, as Lacan calls it - orality having little to do with the nutrition the child cuts out the brest... his little lips not sucking to eat anymore their movement is but a replica - satisfaction implicit in the movement itself. Lacan highlights the mutilation effect. chris (UK) - 03/19/04 02:43:20 EST ... its available as DVD. chris (uk) - 03/19/04 02:41:03 EST it seems to me you've just experienced the unacceptable other, Antonia ... my comment about addiction, was just a comment about jouissance and the lost potential of a site like this. As for digging and any pale reference to the oral drive, I would recommend the 1950's Japanese film, Roshomon, which you may know. It examines an event (a murder) through the eyes of different observers, who see a different event ... Antonia - 03/18/04 13:48:40 EST chris (uk) - what are you talking about? In any case the lack we are referring to is not a consequence of Lacanian pyschoanalysis but a consequence of the artist digging a hole in the flesh of the world... it has nothing to do with eating it. chris (uk) - 03/18/04 03:25:16 EST Antonia, I suppose this phrase slipped out in response to your reference to Merleau-Ponty and as a vegetarian, I might think biscuits are prefereable to flesh! However, I 've just woken up with 'in the beginning was the word and the word was flesh' and perhaps now, your reference makes more room for the visual artist in a texty world? But, I do think you ignore what I'm saying to You, which anchors our conversation in a clinical domain. Surely, psychoanalyis begins with the personal? And surely, Lacan takes the biscuit because he opens up a discourse which includes desire. Didn't Lacan mix a regulatory system and a social existence? Could psychoanalysis be an addiction to the universal? antonia - 03/18/04 01:50:25 EST chris (uk) - what exactly do you mean with taking the biscuit? chris (uk) - 03/17/04 16:59:14 EST Antonia, couldn't we say, Jacques L took the biscuit when he said the unconscious is structured like a language. For art too, of course, this is the case, but it was Jacques biscuit first and the crumps don't amount to art taking a bite! chris (uk) - 03/17/04 16:36:19 EST Antonia, surely what you say uncouples Lac. Ink's premise, psychoanalysis and art. If the lack we are referring to is the consequence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and that praxis has some bearing on contemporary art, then art can't take the biscuit when the biscuit is already eaten. Somewhere, in a recent Lac. Ink, there's reference to art repressing this void and science foreclosing lack. All of which, might be much ado about nothing! What is interesting for me, despite the limitations of virtual communication, is the possibility of collaboration. In this instance, for example, we could begin a writing/ video collaboration. It's not that I want to move away from a resonance which could have some bearing on clinical work, but art, more than psychoanalysis, may be more at home in the virtual world. For JA Miller, I think, psychoanalysis starts with a live meeting. antonia - 03/17/04 13:43:18 EST chris (uk) - the only lack which is crutial is the one the artist can create, I would say. Like in Merleau-Ponty - the artist creates a gap in the flesh of the world, a void, a nothing where previously there had been something. flesh of the world: here everything touches everything else. And Merleau-Ponty will go on to say that the field of the visual is cut out of this flesh. Chris (uk) - 03/17/04 03:10:48 EST ANTONIA, lets say for someone in the position of an artist, working on video pieces, that lack is crucial. I'm working towards an exhibition and there's a deadline. But when I seem to already 'have work', I lose any urgency to make something. When that lack is troubling, when I wake up in the morning and I've done nothing at all, there may be a little wanting. However, this work has to do with the possibility and impossibility of collaboration. The lack of anOTHER, despite Antigone and the illusions of a virtual world ... Antonia - 03/17/04 02:34:32 EST chris (uk) what Lacan calls "the lack in being? it is problematic, sure, like with Antigone, she is unhappy because the form of being she choses starts to get corrupted - now she doesn't like it anymore. How can you be all these non-existing things you mention in your post? chris (uk) - 03/16/04 16:13:23 EST but, but, but Antonia, isn't there a fundamental problem which concerns 'being'? Isn't 'being' problematic for Lacan because 'being' exhausts desire? By this I mean, 'being an artist', 'being a writer', 'being a Lacanian', even 'being the voice'? Or is this conflating 'being' and 'having'? Perhaps it is. But, doesn't Lacan, who was never a Lacanian, say, 'having' hopefully submits to castration, while 'being' requires nothing, only jouissance and the exhaustion of an eternal encore? But again, we can say, following Lacan and Rimbeau, that this 'being' is always somewhere else, that the gaze and voice are always on the side of the Other. Is this saying, I imagine you, therefore I have trouble with this voice and Antonia. The voice is anOther, and you are you, Antonia. This must be another way of saying the messageboard medium is limited. Antonia - 03/16/04 10:21:33 EST chris (uk) - I am saying the gaze as with art... that is, more involved with the viewer and the work of art than with the artist him/herself. And about the voice and the analyst, of course we can think of another example, but this was the one that came to mind. You may remember how on Lacan's grapho, to the right side, as following the line which indicates the chain of the signifiers there is the word voice... chris (uk) - 03/16/04 03:54:52 EST Antonia. I thought so ... but I have wondered all this time! I can only imagine what living in NY is like. But I wouldn't say, the gaze as with the artist and the voice, the analyst. Since Walter Benjamin wrote Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction (and a bit before, too), artists have looked to the voice and have got ever so texty! For some before Benjamin, there was a healthy preoccupation with breast and faeces. However, it seems to me, 'being a Lacanian writer' must be as problematic as 'being an artist' or 'being a therapist'? Antonia - 03/15/04 23:36:32 EST chris (uk) - the gaze as with art... voice as with the voice of the analyst? As to my personal connection to art it is intense, I would say. Then living in NY there's so much to see, to do with art... let's say that my principal thing is my writing - not as an art historian, and not as an art critic... but as a lacanian chris (uk) - 03/14/04 17:54:00 EST Antonia ... how about you? chris (uk) - 03/14/04 17:47:56 EST Antonia, I think this jouissance could be the jouissance of the gaze and voice, as objects of the drive. As for my work?? I was surrounded by art as a child then went to art school, but afterwards saw no reason to exhibit or produce much. Then I gravitated towards work which led to psychotherapy training. However, since this training and more recently, contact with Lacanian ideas, I am increasingly involved with visual processes again and the potential of collaborations and exhibitions. When I referred to art processes months ago, I had in mind a Lac. Ink or messageboard collaboration. I think Lacanian Ink's position between contemporary psychoanalytic and visual art practice is very special. But if visual art now tends towards an answer in the real, like JA Miller's 1988 symptom, then artists can't avoid the real of the virtual world. 'Being an artist' is as problematic as 'being a therapist', but I was trying to say that a subject who finds him/ herself in the position of an artist, inevitably, eventually adopts a position in relation to the gaze of the unacceptable Other. And if, mental health organisations tend to foreclose this Other, then, possibly, sometimes, art has potential in the absence of minimal conditions for practice. I think Badiou suggests comtemporary art tends towards a manifesto, which may be no bad thing in these apolitical times! Antonia - 03/14/04 10:30:46 EST chris (uk) - JA Miller's S (x) was published in Spanish in 1988. (Manantial, Buenos.Aires.) Antonia - 03/14/04 10:01:40 EST chris (uk) - do you mean the desire for the certain jouissance? much as I know desire doesn't have an object, then what kind of an object can jouissance be? Tell me more of you work with visual art processes, are you an artist?, do you write about art, artists? have you read Wajcman's book, L'object du siècle? chris (uk) - 03/14/04 04:30:22 EST Have just gone through JA Miller's S (x) paper in Symptom 5 and wonder when it was written. I wonder if its part of current debate concerning 'minimal condition for practice' and the politics of mental health in France (especially)? Looking at the question of 'evidence' (EBP.) for the unconscious, Miller locates it in the symptom as a response in the real to problems concerning mastery. This seems to foreclose the late Lacan of the 'not all'. The 'Courtil papers' make the point that reference to the 'Nom-de-Pere' is problematic in practice with children whose symtoms are mainly psychotic. The work is seen in terms of a relation to jouissance. Miller substitutes the term 'hatification' for foreclosure, whereas, the Courtil stress glimmerings of desire, which of course imply a relation to mastery. So, is this JA Miller sidetracked by the lure of scientific discourse and what has scientific dicourse to do with psychosis? Unless of course psychoanalysis never strays from mastery (and a journey from what Kleinians call the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position)! Then, if the symptom provides evidence for the unconscious, is it only the 'encore' of the symptom, and in this instance of this paper, an 'encore' which forecloses psychosis? David - 03/13/04 16:20:16 EST to Rui : interesting you bring this up. I think that subrepticiously Deleuze and Guattari are only attacking the Freudian realist ego in the Anti-Oedipus all the while passing over in silence Lacanian brand of psychoanalysis. It is obviously the 'productivist' repression and the fake biological determinism of early Freud that disturbs them. In fact, as far as I know, Deleuze never tried to take on Lacan in any of his books, not even in footnotes. Quite frankly and with all respect for the genius of Deleuze, the psychoanalysis was not his domain. As for Guattari, I don't know his writings all that well to judge his qualifications. chris (uk) - 03/10/04 03:23:08 EST hello again Antonia, for an artist 'working with new ideas' (perhaps), work ex-ists between a particular context, organisations and the unacceptible Other. And this state of affairs makes the work sometimes impossible. The work involves the return of the repressed or foreclosed and the artist rediscovers another's desire at odds with the desire of the Other. When Lacan takes us from desire to the drive, doesn't he open up the moment when we find desire in jouissance? Working off the beaten track, has for me meant moving away from clinical work, back towards possibilities inherent in visual art processes. Where I live and work, perhaps minimal conditions for clinical work don't exist. In this context, local mental health organisations seem preoccupied with an acceptible Other, while the unacceptible version seems foreclosed. When Lacan takes us away from 'not giving up on our desire' to the drives, doesn't this add something to desire? If we are captivated by the desire of the Other, then can't we sometimes look in the direction of the (unacceptible) gaze? (Antonia, messageboarding is good, but so too email!?) Antonia - 03/10/04 00:27:29 EST chris (uk) - do the drives that take over convey the desire? Rui - 03/05/04 15:23:29 EST Hello Could anyone indicate me a book with a Lacanian perspective of Deleuze and Guttari's book "Anti-oedipus"? What is your opinion about Julia's Kristeva book "Sense and non sense of revolt- powers and limits of psychoanalysis"? Thanks :) chris (uk) - 02/29/04 02:34:02 EST Perhaps he did, but repetition is sometimes seen, borrowing from Freud, as the return of the real, which seems less traumatic in late Lacan. In late Lacan, there's a move away from desire to the drives. Lacanian freedom could be seen as looking after desire, but later the 'encore' of the drives concerns something universal and with it, a new potential for freedom. Patrick - 02/28/04 12:01:52 EST am i right in thinking it was lacan who said 'repetition is the limit of freedom'? if so, where and when did he say it? thanks. Chris (uk) - 02/27/04 02:59:26 EST Carina, for a Lacanian perspective you could try 'The Psychoanalysis of Race', edited by Christopher Lane, Colombia University Press or look back through abstracts of Lacanian Ink articles which you'd find on this site carina - 02/26/04 10:13:34 EST ok if anyone sees this and can help me out my email is carinamorton@hotmail.com. i'd appreciate any info u have as i have to do my dissertation REALLY soon! thanx! carina - 02/26/04 10:12:16 EST hello? carina - 02/26/04 10:11:24 EST does anyone have any info on Lacan's theories on 'black male/female sexuality' in relation to otherness? kim - 02/26/04 09:11:10 EST Zizek locates himself 'lacanian'. But I think he is going too far. ,,,,, He is no more lacanian. He is zizekian. chris (uk) - 02/22/04 05:07:41 EST Antonia, I missed you ... what happened? If the messageboard isn't the place, then use email. Terry 1. I can muse because I have time to, I suppose and perhaps work is sublime. The Social Realists thought so. But, it is Sunday today and because it is hard to work where I live, I have in mind the work of the visual artist, where work never ceases to be 'suppleance'. Look at the Courtil papers description of work. Are these envious lines? In a group I attended a few days ago, the subject of the sublime somehow 'arose' in connection to the primal scene. This puzzled me. How could something which so troubled the Romantics cuddle up to the primal scene, which has troubled everyone since Freud. With Lacan, the Phallus is not sublime, but the Romantics anticipate sublimation, the subliminal and repression. But, are we still living in a period where work is sublime and are the Courtil papers' descriptions of the work of autistic children remedial? Are you exposing my reliance on the virtual world? Antonia - 02/22/04 00:43:32 EST chris (uk) - just a few words tp tell you how much i miss my regular life, i had an accident -- so now i am paying the consequences. i'll be back and running this next vweek - let's say thursdat,friday Terry1 - 02/21/04 16:58:16 EST Chris keep your musings going we read them. I come infrequently, I'm working 70 hours per week......too much. What did Lacan write on Othello? I've just seen Anthony Sher at Stratford. It was sublime. Chris (uk) - 02/10/04 13:59:20 EST I don't want to clog up what was an empty January chatroom with my messages, but before I shut up, a poem for Antonia. Its from a text I told you about ... I want you to be her not the one I saw, sitting in my car I want you to ... act one side of a tenuous relationship chris (uk) - 02/07/04 06:16:07 EST If the transference changes science when its poetry addresses power and the positions we talk from, then how can there be a 'worst transference'. A 'worst transference', whatever this means, is only transference, the trigger of analysis and a lot more. I certainly remember pissing my pants as a young child starting school and have some idea what older people feel about these issues. Apart from which, pissing implies a residue which is certainly interesting in the context of a Lacanian chatroom. Lacan was old eventually and no doubt sometimes got a little damp. At the moment, I'm using video to make an exhibition installation. And working with people (actors) is very hard. Just as hard, it seems to me, as the process Jacques- Alain Miller implies when he says, we can't assume anything about the Other or the other, in clinical work. Because this video work has to do with tentative and tenuous processes too, I'm sometimes left on my own. Bereft of collaborators. I live on a small island and one day recently, when I couldn't find help with my project, I wondered down to an old sewage outlet and filmed treated but beautifully golden liquid pouring out onto a beach. I thought about Lacanian residues that day but could have remembered your comment too, Michel. But if I did, it certainly wasn't the 'worst transference'. Michel - 02/07/04 01:13:32 EST A giving up, an absence of desire? I become more enamored by Houellebecq and less with Lacan when I find a desire for the truth to be carved in stone, a pronouncement to a gathering. I wrote before about Freud pissing himself, he asked his assistant to analyze him after he so insouciance wet his pants, and is this not the worst transference? Harming oneself before the jury abjures. Ask Miller about faith. Better, ask him about truth, faith and truth appear to be inseparable to J.A. and the poetry of J-M-E become pseudo science, although greater than silence, betrays a fat lonely soul... chris (uk) - 02/06/04 16:55:03 EST If Platonic desire is also not giving up on desire, surely psychoanalysis concerns itself with the absence of desire too, absence as a residue. A description of the drives and objects of the drives may be relevant to the psychoses, but also depression. Wasn't this how Lacan made sense of the eternal in us? If faith is hopeful, hopefully, 'not knowing' resonates in therapy and in our musings ... Tom - 02/05/04 20:23:52 EST I think Lacan anticipated a number of things that resonate ever-more powerfully, Chris, perhaps the most poignant and troubling being his idea of the dialectic's culmination in the service of the machine. I guess if one believes in tragedy as being the fundamental form in which human life expresses itself, the trends we're witnessing (and suffering from) today - rabid scientism, blind submission to the market - are to be expected, understood and ultimately even accepted. Under this reading the story of our culture is just one more Shakespearean tragedy; the stage at the end is littered with corpses, and the audience (presumably, in our case, being the gods themselves) go home nourished and entertained. But I think there are themes that run even deeper than tragedy, and perhaps that the embracing of human life as being ultimately irrelevant to the rest of the universe has the scent of self-fulfilling prophecy to it that Lacanians would prefer not to think about. It does sometimes seem odd that someone who loved Plato as much as Lacan did not, in his conception of the relationship between the human and the cosmos, have a little more faith in him. Chris - 01/26/04 18:05:57 EST ps. third paragraph should read: I couldn't go to the study day in Paris ... Chris (Isles de la Manche Uk) - 01/26/04 18:01:53 EST If this messageboard and no Symptom this Autumn is anything to go by, then the Lacanian world has gone quiet. Is the silence the quiet following scansion, not in a session, but following something somebody said on the messageboard or is it the accumulated weight of cognitive therapy and evidence based therapy? Freud‚s revolution and Lacan‚s mindful reading challenged powerful orthodoxy and there‚s been so little said this month on this site, that silence may have little say in the face of the new orthodoxy and contemporary power. I imagine our silence is scanded silence and we fear to say the wrong thing, but saying the wrong thing is not keeping quiet in a world of dubious power. Long live this messageboard as a transferential process and psychoanalysis as subversion. I couldn‚t go the study in Paris on Saturday last, when the topic was minimum political conditions for practice. I should have gone because its a battle fought where I live too (of course). I‚d love to know what transpired and what can said of psychoanalysis in the product driven world of EBP. Did Lacan anticipate the hegemony of the discourse of science when he became preoccupied with the drive at the expense of desire at the end of his life? Hmmm... - 01/20/04 18:35:23 EST No expert, but in seminar 3 on the psychoses, I believe I recall Lacan talking about the quilting points as being relatively few in number, and that they basically function as ways that the subject hooks onto the symbolic, or forms an imaginary relationship with it, and that it is through the oedipalization of the infant that the subject comes to form 'normal' attachment to or relationship with the symbolic... in other words, the quilting points are ideologically grafted so to speak, and are structural inasmuch as they position the subject in his/her imaginary relationship to/with the symbolic, and by extension, though by a relationship of exclusion, to/with the real as well... I think Zizek talks about this in Sublime Object as well, although it has been a while since I have read either text. This may be totally inaccurate info, like I said, it has been a while. - 01/13/04 14:30:31 EST ... ps. I was referring to the previous message with email address not this site. But, I've a question which is: Why is Lacanian literature mostly dense as a form? It may be the case that it takes time to read something worth reading and it may be the case that it takes time to learn how to read. But post Lacan literature is terse and elaborate at the same time. Art has to succeed these days in the symbolic and real at the same time, but Lacanian literature is still a symbolic diction most of the time. I have in mind the film transcript by Alan Fair in our wonderful last, some time ago now ... Le Symptome Chris (uk) - 01/12/04 14:47:11 EST This site makes reference to net art (I think) which is sometimes interesting but when net art's shy of symbolic spaces ... like museums and galleries ... it could be shy of a real viewer and shy of what Lacan calls castration. a - 01/12/04 04:07:09 EST know this? http://www.iterature.com/adwords chris (uk) - 01/11/04 05:44:26 EST Antonia, did you get my email address co. Perfume? Chris (uk) - 01/09/04 18:44:32 EST Chole, the quilting point gives an armchair or sofa (lets say) a distinctive shape, so perhaps lends shape to the subject, but a quilting point too has a shape if it involves paternal function. It would be worth doing some (Lacanian) research and finding out why this lecturer is interrested in Lacanian theory. Don't know the film ... Chole - 01/09/04 15:59:30 EST Thx Chris! Actually I'm also in UK (overseas student in uni) and I'm now writing an essay. Basically I'm writing stuffs concerning semiology and I plan to use a film "Far from Heaven" as my text in which there're issues about representation of 'negro' and 'homosexual'. And my lecturer suggested me to write something related to Lacanian theory of the subject and also the quilting point because those representation involves a process of identification...which I dun really understand... :( Chris (CI) (UK) - 01/08/04 03:22:34 EST There are many texts which make the case of Lacanian theory and somewhere on this website, there must be reading lists. Without wishing to attempt explanation, in Lacanian theory perhaps, the subject is the consequence of the quilting point and the latter, an indication of paternal function in Freud's Oedipus metaphor. However, the quilting point has to be relevant to discussion concerning minimal political conditions for practice. In the Uk. and where I live, politicians and health organisations are threatened by psychoanalytically informed work, because the quilting point and paternal function are part of the internal dynamic of practice which is careful not to abuse being in a position which is the consequence of transference Chole - 01/07/04 09:31:01 EST anyone here? ummm...i'd like to ask somethings about Lacanian theory of the subject and the significance of the'quilting point'...could anyone explain that to me?