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LACANIAN INK 34 – Fall

Delirium

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK – THE POLITICAL PARALLAX
Miguel Abreu Gallery,
New York City, October 7/2009

I am Josefina Ayerza, the editor of lacanian ink.

Let me thank you all for coming, and let us thank Miguel Abreu for his unwavering desire with hosting these events.

The new issue of lacanian ink, slated to appear October 20, is being finished off at the printer. And this is how we've contributed a few dummies for you to read at leisure, tonight.

lacanian ink 34 calls on Delirium as its overall topic.

With Jacques-Alain Miller the actual Delirium soars back to its Invention... here everyone's 'me-I' (in French moi-je) is delirious. All about "oneself" you can assume that delirium is an amplification of what each one has in him/herself, which can be written thus: 'delirIum' in French (délireje)... Miller distinguishes the rich deliriums from poor ones, he also differentiates the delirium of hallucination by specifying that delirium is a discourse. An articulated discourse, the elementary phenomena take the value of detaching the primary elements from which the set of the delirious discourse is constructed and elaborated.

This logical slant led Clérambault for example, to distinguish deliriums of passion, among which he emphasized erotomania, which establishes postulates like "he loves me," "he does not refuse me," "he does not say 'no... she doesn't want what she says she wants..." etc.) leaving unchanged the actual premise of departure.

And something of the organic could be determining the intrusion of an element in the psyche – as it situates a causality of psychosis that is not exactly psychic: the evidence of an organic causality is imposed when nothing can take account of what happens or of what one expects. There is a discontinuity, and something absolutely new is introduced in the psyche. In the face of this brute and bizarre fact that emerges, the subject reacts by trying to account for it with delirious explanations and constructions.

Josefina Ayerza—Slavoj Zizek

One can speak of an initial paranoia of every subject at the beginning of an analysis, for example... something similar is produced so that the interpretation can begin. This is what Lacan calls signifier of transference which precipitates the emergence of the subject-supposed-to-know - the support of interpretation, in which the relationship to this elementary phenomenon asserts that this signifier is equivalent to the beginning of a delirium.

It is when the relation of signifier to signifier is interrupted, when there is a broken chain, an interrupted sentence, that the symbol rejoins the real. But it does not rejoin it under the form of representation. We can look at President Schreber's interrupted sentences. Here the signifier does not represent the least part of the real world. It makes an irruption there; that is to say that a part of the symbolic becomes real.

Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that he was a transvestite, and the lover of God. They copulated through the nerves, which rose to the sky, went through the clouds, to meet the descending divine rays... He writes in his Mémoires, "Few people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I... but as soon as I am alone with God, if I may so express myself, I must continually or at least at certain times, strive to give divine rays the impression of a woman in the height of sexual delight; to achieve this I have to employ all possible means, and have to strain all my intellectual powers and foremost my imagination..."

Says Lacan, I quote: "the term which I translate as Nerve-annexation, and which comes from these messages illustrates this remark insofar as passion and action between these beings are reduced to those annexed or disannexed nerves, but also insofar as these nerves, just like the divine rays with which they are homogeneous, are nothing but the identification of the spoken words they bear: which the voices formulate as, "Do not forget that the nature of the rays is that they must speak."

So encore in lacanian ink 34...

Alain Badiou's very personal Delirium wants to include Plato in contemporary discourse, to present him to everyone as being absolutely available... I quote "...for the only thing that matters is that thought indeed be the liveliest, most concrete thing in the world."

Pierre-Gilles Guéguen tells of Jean Genet's difficult stance as he struggles throughout perverse, masochist, psychotic symptoms... If they have an "ordinary" character it is because they are hardly distinguishable from straightforward delinquency itself.

Alongside François Regnault you may envision Dante's Hell: the sad plunged into murky, nauseating water… I quote "They are there for eternity, which characterizes the psychotic melancholic, but also sadness in general, for which they are punished, for which they punish themselves incessantly..."

Delirium with Gérard Wajcman is a "Dream of Eternity..." From where the perspective is restoration... "No work of art will ever be declared dead, naturally dead... even reduced to a miserable fragment, shard or rag, it will be called 'a work of art.'"

"Left to the vagaries of the Symbolic, says Slavoj Žižek, interpretation is the endless process to discover a secret behind a secret... psychoanalysis is not hermeneutics, especially not a deep one. It deals with the subject contemporary to the rise of the modern Real, which emerges when meaning is evacuated from reality.

The artist on the cover is Leonid Sokov... The urinating endeavor, of Lenin, of the Bear, writes letters on the sand. The letters are C C C P, which stand for S S S R meaning Union of Soviet and Socialists Republics...