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To resume again...
The Logic of the Cure
J - A
MILLER
The Prisons of Jouissance
J - A
MILLER
The Phallus and Perversion
J - A
MILLER
Adorno's Negative Dialectics and Wagner
ALAIN BADIOU
Saintliness and the Sainthood
FRANÇOIS REGNAULT
The Animals that Treat Us Badly
GÉRARD WAJCMAN
The Fall of Sleep
JEAN-LUC NANCY
Josephine le Sinthome
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
The Fall of SoHo
RICHARD KOSTELANETZ
Ridley Howard
CATHY LEBOWITZ
interviews
JOSEFINA AYERZA
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Jacques-Alain Miller
translated by Barbara P. Fulks
There is a clinical pair that presides over Lacan’s first elaboration of the theory of the phallus. We devote ourselves to finding the genesis of the phallic function in his teaching, formulated in Écrits in relationship to psychosis, for the purpose of returning its true nature to the phallus, which doesn’t come from the paternal metaphor. For that reason, interest turned to the Name-of-the-Father and, correlatively, a certain shadow fell over the phallus. No doubt this shadow revived in Lacan what perhaps was a necessity to dedicate and publish a conference on the signification of the phallus. But, he invested the theory with this signification of the phallus in a recovery of the psychopathology of Freud’s love life. By formulating the theory itself as exclusively signifying—and this was a great exploit at that time—the clinical practice from which it was born remained veiled.
Here we must remember the clinical pair that was mentioned, and that dominates in the theory of the phallus: I am referring to phobia and fetishism. This pair that Lacan tackled in his Seminar IV, La relation d’objet, continues to be present in Écrits and will reappear recurrently over the years. On the last page, the warning that the phallus in play is that of the mother accompanies the mention of phobia and of fetishism. So the Lacanian phallus is born on the side of the woman, between fetishism and phobia.
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