This paper is concerned with the background to Lacan’s Seminar I, chapter xx on Augustine’s De magistro, its manuscript sources, editions and structure. The discussion of Augustine’s treatise was suggested to Lacan by Louis Beirnaert but he seems not to have known the text. We argue that there are reasons to think the suggestion came from his Jesuit confrere Paul Henry, the learned co-editor of the Enneads, who was helping to organise an international congress in Paris that year on Augustine. (...) Although the history of the discussion of ‘signs’ goes back to Aristotle, the only attempt to bring signification into a theory of language, prior to Augustine, is found in a passage in Plotinus which Henry had discussed some years earlier. The Latin text of De magistro they used was, unfortunately, badly corrupted and this contributed to a mistaken understanding of its structure. Nevertheless, Lacan found some important parallels between Augustine’s view on teaching and the complexity of understanding and his own teaching and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The article outlines a meditation on the strategic structure of space, on the tactical definition of the relations of interiority/exteriority, on the processual nature of identifications – i.e. on the way an event summons the subject within a group while drawing both the subject as belonging to the group and the group as belonging to that subject. Two texts guide this reflection: ‘Space’ by Georges Bataille and The Groupist by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares.

Le parole hanno una presa sul corpo; è una realtà nota da sempre. Le parole feriscono, le parole curano, le parole uccidono, come mostra magistralmente Claude Lévi-Strauss in Antropologia strutturale. Il sintomo, corporeo e/o mentale, ne è una testimonianza. Già Ferdinand de Saussure aveva dimostrato nella parola la scissione tra significante e significato; e inoltre la distanza tra la cosa e il suo nome. Non c’è un significato granitico delle parole soggette all’inevitabile metamorfosi che abita la vita. Ci sono le (...) omofonie. Tutto questo anima l’equivoco, lo scambio, la confusione. Si fraintende, si sovrainterpreta. Non solo, Lacan aggiunge a De Saussure che la lingua, non è un oggetto neutro, ma è abitata dal godimento, dalla pulsione e per questo Lacan usa il neologismo lalingua. Ora, la pulsione è pulsione di morte. Anna Karenina porta fino alle estreme conseguenze gli scambi della lingua; interpreta le parole dell’amato e ne legge il segno della mancanza del suo amore. Di fronte all’impossibilità di fare uno con l’uomo amato scambia la vita con la morte. (shrink)

The author discusses the idea, quite widespread among left-wing intellectuals, that capitalism is essentially a speculative process. In particular, he criticizes the idea—taken up by Agamben—that money itself has a sort of religious faith as the foundation of its value, and that therefore money and religions are illusions to be overcome. According to the author, this theory is based on the assumption that money, being a pure cultural construction and thus unnatural, is a pure illusory construction, while we ought to (...) be authentic as dogs are (the Greek cynics). The author shows how instead money is one of the most real things because it is based on an economy of human desire, and on the fact—which Aristotle had already noted—that exchange always takes place between those who have more than what they desire and others who have too little of what they desire. Thus, by refuting the Marxist theory of labor-value, the author puts the economy of desire as the basis of the real economy, of which money is an expression. The value of a currency is correlated to the power of a country’s economy to satisfy the demands of those who participate in the market. (shrink)

Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency, which Michel Foucault called ‘the greatest book of our time’, takes its title from a parody of a classical utopia that appears at the end of the book. Klossowski imagines a phase in industrial production where producers are able to demand objects of sensation, i.e. pleasure, from consumers as a form of payment. These objects would be living beings. Human beings, in other words, would be traded as currency: employers would pay their male workers in women, (...) female workers would be paid in boys, and so on. This is neither prostitution nor slavery, where humans are bought and sold using monetary currency. Rather, it is humans themselves that are used as currency, a living currency, and they can function as currency because they are sources of sensation, emotion and pleasure. Far from being imaginary or ideal, Klossowski insists that this counter-utopia already exists in contemporary capitalism. Our article will describe it, emphasising the importance that adhering to it can have from a psychic, libidic and social point of view. (shrink)

The author examines some aspects of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The hypothesis of the text is that in the writings of the great American poet can be traced an instance of openness to what Lacanian psychoanalysis calls the real, in the form of repetition but above all in that of ecstasy. The other side of Edgar Allan Poe’s work consists of his great trust in logos, as shown by the ‘mathematical’ method of his character Dupin. The two sides are not (...) only the reverse of each other but, above all, inseparable and necessary to each other. (shrink)

Psychoanalysis declares itself an anti-philosophy. For Freud and Lacan and their followers, philosophy does not take into account the role of the unconscious, and depends on the self-certainty of conscious thought. These are false assertions. Aristotle, the Peripatetics, Plato and Plotinus all acknowledged the role of unconscious thought: knowledge of which we are unaware (Meno 80d, Phaedo 68b–d), intellectual activity that we do no apprehend in conscious thought (Enn. IV.3.30), thoughts that we do not consciously grasp (V.1.12), or thoughts prior (...) to conscious awareness in perception (V.1.12). Psychoanalysis, like phenomenology, is based on discursive reason (dianoia) and perceived phenomena, and neglects the role of noetic thought, thought not connected to sense perception. For Lacan, influenced by structural linguistics, the signifier must precede the signified, as the perception must precede the idea. Freud and Husserl abandoned the teachings of their professor Brentano. According to Brentano in The Psychology of Aristotle, it is only when the activity of the active intellect (of Averroes) ‘has made the images intelligible in unconscious thought’ that the material intellect ‘receives from the images the concepts of sensible things’ (1977: 10). For Plotinus, it is only when the activities of intellect are shared with perception that ‘conscious awareness takes place’ (Enn. V.1.2). Freud saw the images of the unconscious becoming conscious through language (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis), while Lacan saw the language of the unconscious becoming conscious through images (Écrits). Neither presented a complete picture of how the mind works. Psychoanalysis needs to reclaim the philosophical unconscious in order to present a complete picture of the mind. (shrink)

Gregory La Cava’s 1936 screwball comedy film My Man Godfrey is structured by consubstantiality, which will be defined here as the reification of a second, oppositional element in response to the negation of a first. Because the second element is conditioned by the very thing it negated, a third element is required to reverse the (subjective) point of view as corollary to the first, objective reversal. The film takes place in the depths of the Great Depression; its story centers on (...) the discovery and restoration of ‘the forgotten man’, represented by Godfrey Parke, who has renounced his wealth and social position to live in a shanty-town under the pseudonym of Smith following a failed love-affair. After being ‘claimed’ during a scavenger hunt, he becomes the butler of the family of a New York industrialist, Alexander Bullock. One daughter, Irene, falls in love with him; the other, Cornelia, attempts to frame him by planting ‘stolen’ pearls. Godfrey eludes her trap and uses collateral from the pearls to invest in the futures market, where he rescues his host’s company’s shares to save the family from ruin. With surplus funds he reclaims the shanty-town site and builds a modernist night-club, employing his former ‘forgotten men’ companions. Consubstantiality is played out visually and dramatically. Its component parts are encoded into a visual paradigm to demonstrate the toroidal logic that connects consubstantiality to Jacques Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation. Here, topology qualifies Freud’s contention that ‘Psyche is extended; knows nothing of it’ by showing how the non-orientation of the 2-d manifold becomes the self-intersecting traps of 3-d immersion – traps that are already well-known as dramatic devices. (shrink)

Aliénation et séparation sont, selon Lacan, les deux mécanismes fondamentaux qui composent le processus de constitution subjective. Tandis que l’aliénation définit la dépendance structurelle du vivant de l’Autre (tant au niveau imaginaire qu’au niveau symbolique), la séparation représente la phase dans laquelle l’être humain se perçoit comme distinct de l’Autre. Le modèle mythique et prototypique de cette épiphanie subjective est l’acte de naissance : en elle, le fœtus se détache des enveloppes embryonnaires, établissant comme matrice de chaque future séparation l’identification (...) du sujet à l’objet qui se sépare de la totalité qui l’absorbait. Mais Lacan note que dans cet événement originel il y a libération de libido : chaque séparation ultérieure reproduira donc cette association initiale de la séparation elle-même à une activation du système, mémoire d’une rencontre inoubliable avec la vie. C’est dans cet événement auroral que en effet, se dégage ce plus de jouir dont Lacan lui-même tirera le concept d’objet petit a. Un bref fragment clinique tentera de transférer sur le plan de la pratique analytique les élaborations théoriques discutés. (shrink)

The uproarious response to Andrew Dominik’s divisive biopic/horror film Blonde (2022), imagining the unseen torments of Marilyn Monroe, at once points to the inherently contested nature of Monroe’s existence (doe-eyed sacred victim versus shrewd, talented businesswoman) and more fundamentally to the very question of misrecognition itself: the route by which every speaking subject must come to inhabit existence. Virtually every scene of the film confronts us with a form of doubling, both in Marilyn’s own image and in her relationship to (...) us as voracious spectators and adoring fans. Her body is simultaneously deified, adored, invaded, colonized, raped and aborted; a feminist observation so trite as to become barely remarkable. But what is the function of the ‘Bombshell’ today as the force of sexual power under capitalism? And how does the face and ‘faciality’ as a concept relate to the Bombshell? A Theory of the Bombshell, a reference to Tiqqun’s Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (MIT Press, 2012), would attempt to conceptualise the Bombshell as that which (in contrast to the entrepreneurial self) embodies the explosive existential potential of Monroe as a fatherless, motherless being who gave birth to itself. (shrink)

This paper is the first of a series of reflections on the matter of the relation between psychic and technological apparatuses today. In contrast to the claim that Freudian psychoanalysis is marked by a dearth of reflection on technology, it advances the argument that a technological imagination has always been present at the heart of Freudian theory, and even defines it. Thus it reconceptualises the Freudian drive as essentially and topologically continuous with exterior technological objects qua a system of organs, (...) employing Stiegler’s framework of a general organology, together with Tomšič’s analysis of the drives as deviational. Rereading Freud and Lacan’s reflections on the organs of the drives under this aspect, it postulates the Freudian drive as itself an extimate organisation in light of the contemporary problem of enjoying bodies (jouissance). (shrink)

As a key psychoanalytic concept, the unconscious designates a fundamental dimension of subjectivity and discourse. In the phenomenological tradition, the unconscious was also examined as the limit phenomena of conscious experience in Husserl’s work and has received further attention from subsequent phenomenologists. Against this background, this paper attempts to review and explore the development of the concept of the unconscious in the theoretical careers of Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. In the 1950s, influenced by Saussurean linguistics, both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan turned their (...) attention to the relationship between the unconscious and the symbolic, thus forming a direct dialogue between these two influential trends of thought in the twentieth century. By comparing the theoretical similarities and differences between their work on this subject, this paper attempts to unpack different layers of the meaning of the unconscious across disciplines and offer an expended understanding of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Did ancient thinkers have a notion of the unconscious? In this paper I contend that bishop Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) conveyed the unconscious mind in at least two of his works: On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed (chapter 2.3) and in his theory of three visions in The Literal Meaning of Genesis (book XII). We can detect in these works similarities which approach certain concepts from 20th century psychoanalysts. In other works of Augustine (such as The Trinity IX and (...) X and Confessions X), the bishop goes to great lengths to attempt to describe the complex inner mechanisms of the human mind and memory. Formulations from these works will also be utilized to supplement my explanation of Augustine’s understanding of the unconscious in the aforementioned treatises. (shrink)