Minds, Bodies and Other Problems
STUART SCHNEIDERMAN

Three Conclusions
RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN

Hegel's Logic
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

The Subject Defined by Suffrage
JOAN COPJEC

The Three
ADRIAN DANNATT

Obsessions
JEAN-GUY GODIN

A Mall Melodrama...
PEGGY PHELAN

A Lemon
ELAINE EQUI

My Inflatable You
DANIEL PINCHBECK

What Remains
MAX BLAGG

Interview with
Wim Delvoye

Interview with
Sue Williams

Given the epoch-making drama of this century's end and the fact that the event is already exceeded by the millennium's end, it seems appropriate to revise the social implications of this last century's ultimate myth.
Stuart Schneiderman introduces a hero (in evidence) of a major mind body problem: his mind, detaching from the body, is in turn split. This skirmish brings up the figures of the detective and the criminal: obviously set against each other, thus making for a moral quest; now the problem affects the social group, now it structures the body politic.
As Schneiderman's "...mind containing the wisdom of ages" meets Slavoj Zizek's "...casual chain of reasons provided by knowledge, " Lacanian mathemes introduce an S

— in Joan Copjec's terms "...the substance of the body politic."
The matter continues the discussion of the "body" concept set up in lacanian ink 3's "To resume again..." This substance only exists in relation to the being of it, which is no other than the enjoyment of it jumping into another body. In this issue, Schneiderman will address the social springing out of the natural order, Zizek will determine the cultural rising out of the biological, Copjec will consider the members of a modern nation "under the concept identical to the concept: citizens of x."
Yet midway between the body politic and the act of choice (S

Is the act of choice disclosing a criminal pattern? Is the gap accounting for a detective's work?
Founding the symbolic dimension, the function of the signifier is nevertheless to talk nonsense, play the fool — Jacques Lacan equates it to smiling angels in cathedrals (just a head and two wings). Yet only the signifier is to isolate the analytic discourse as such. "If the angel has a silly smile it's because he swims in the supreme signifier. To rediscover himself somehow out in the dry will not harm him — maybe he even stops smiling."

Angels or devils, this is the kind of nonsense from where psychoanalysis begins as it enters the path to the new subject which is the subject of the unconscious:

The psychoanalytic discourse was engendered in democratic times, but the framework of democracy does not resolve its own social collective problems:
Total withdrawal of libido draining the social invests the ego. "The body politic and the body ego break up, modern man becomes lost in the crowd."³
The subject seeks the maximum of pleasure and the minimum of pain, thus utilitarianism gets to govern, control the external conditions which influence decisions.
Can the criminal be defeated by the detective?
Raphael Rubinstein finds a metaphoric answer to the personalized question. But still, is Dupin prevailing in a democratic context?
Adrian Dannatt has found a petit objet b entangled between the Masquerade and the Gaze. We'll have to believe him.
Peggy Phelan plays out the actual Melodrama to the lens of the camera: she discovers an extra "s," a joke, a ghost, a skull. Might one conclude that the excursion into the painting, while a parody of psychoanalysis, "storms doors," loss at the threshold: art, power, passion, knowledge, should unite man in time to set him free of the crowd.
Jean-Guy Godin sets up the infrastructure of obsession through an actual case.
The analyst (a detective?) discloses the mis-en-scène of a quadruple crime: the patient's "wild crossing" of the fantasme is prompted by the idea of the murders of his fiancée, his sister... moreover at this point he has already eaten the mother, "...this murder of the woman echoes the murder of the Thing, of the mother as thing... " The fourth nominee is himself "...the woman that he is as well?"⁴
The body politic may echo its subjects. "The solution is not found in the reunion of mind and body, but in the defeat of the criminal mind by the mind of the detective."⁵

JOSEFINA AYERZA

Notes
1. Slavoj Zizek, "Hegel's Logic as a Theory of Ideology," lacanian ink 7, p.29. back up
2. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XX: Encore, Seuil, Paris, 1975, p.24. back up
3. Joan Copjec, "The Subject Defined by Suffrage," lacanian ink 7, p.48. back up
4. Jean-Guy Godin, "Obsessions," lacanian ink 7, p.73. back up
5. Stuart Schneiderman, The Worst Perversion, lacanian ink 7, p.23. back up