Lacan

Philosophy Philosophers Psychoanalysis Psychoanalysts

Phenomenology Structuralism Anthropology Psychology


see also Freud


What is realised in my history is not the past definitive of what it was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.


Desire is beyond structure, beyond words - it is merely the unutterable, ineffable. That which remains nameless, indescribable, unknown, is surely that which haunts us, and it is ominous precisely because it is alien (heteronomous).


Against philosophical accounts: Lockean, descriptivist or phenomenological, which argue that meaning is formed prior to the communicative act, Lacan's philosophy of language, as encoded by the graph of desire, defines speech as a process in which the subjects get their meanings back from the Other in an inverted form.


The ego is mislead in its misrecognition of its unity and coherence


The links between Lacanian thought and authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, Sophocles, Racine, Shakespeare, Joyce and Duras are well known and have been extendedly researched.


Lacan's perspective contends that the world of language, the Symbolic, structures the human mind, and stresses the centrality of desire to psychoanalysis, which is conceived of as inescapable and impossible to satisfy.

Lacan has been particularly influential in post-structuralist literary theory and gender theory, as well as in various branches of critical theory. There is a Lacanian strand in left-wing politics, including Saul Newman's and Duane Rousselle's post-anarchism, Louis Althusser's structural Marxism, and the thought of Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou.


"It was not until much later that Freud was to proclaim the universality of the 'castration complex', with all the difficulties its application entailed, especially in the case of girls. Only with Lacan will this universality be posited as an a priori - and this in the name of a metaphysical turn which desexualizes everything: castration becomes the signifier of human finitude, a finitude which we must all assume; and this becomes the goal of psychoanalysis."


Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Lacan tried to articulate the psychoanalytic process in terms of an intersubjective logic of the recognition of desire and/or the desire for recognition, following Kojeve.

Developmentally, knowledge is paranoiac because it is acquired through our imaginary relation to the other as a primordial misidentification or illusory self-recognition of autonomy, control, and mastery, thus leading to persecutory anxiety and self-alienation. Secondarily, through the symbolic structures of language and speech, desire is foisted upon us as a foreboding demand threatening to invade and destroy our uniquely subjective inner experiences. And finally, the process of knowing itself is paranoiac because it horrifically confronts the real, namely, the unknown.


The first stage, that of 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', places the accent on the intersubjective dimension of speech: speech as the medium of the intersubjective recognition of desire. The predominant themes in this stage are symbolization as historicization and symbolic realization: symptoms, traumas, are the blank, empty, non-historicizable spaces of the subject's symbolic universe. Analysis, then, 'realizes in the symbolic' these traumatic traces, including them in the symbolic universe by conferring upon them after the fact, retrospectively, some signification. Basically, a phenomenological conception of language, close to that of Merleau-Ponty, is here retained: the goal of analysis is to produce the recognition of desire through 'full speech', to integrate desire within the universe of signification. In a typically phenomenological way, the order of speech is identified with that of signification, and analysis itself functions at this level: 'All analytical experience is an experience of signification.'

The second stage, exemplified in the interpretation of "The Purloined Letter", is in some ways complementary to the first, just as language is complementary to speech. It places the emphasis on the signifying order as (that of) a closed, differential, synchronous structure: the signifying structure functions as a senseless 'automatism', to which the subject is subjected. The diachronic order of speech, of signification, is thus governed by a senseless, signifying automatism, by a differential and formalizable game that produces the effect of signification. This structure that 'runs the game' is concealed by the Imaginary relationship - one is here at the level of the 'schema L':

We realize, of course, the importance of these Imaginary impregnations (Prägung) in those partializations of the symbolic alternative which give the symbolic chain its appearance. But we maintain that it is the specific law of that chain which governs those psychoanalytic effects that are decisive for the subject: such as foreclosure (Verwerfung), repression (Verdrängung), denial (Verneinung) itself - specifying with appropriate emphasis that these effects follow so faithfully the displacement (Enstellung) of the signifier that imaginary factors, despite their inertia, figure only as shadows and reflections in this process.


In 1951, Lacan began to give private lectures in Sylvia Bataille’s apartment
at 3 rue de Lille. The lectures were attended by a small group of trainee psychoanalysts,
and were based on readings of some of Freud’s case histories: Dora, the Rat Man and the
Wolf Man. In 1953, the venue of these lectures moved to the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, where
a larger audience could be accommodated. Although Lacan sometimes refers to the
private lectures of 1951–2 and 1952–3 as the first two years of his ‘seminar’, the term is
now usually reserved for the public lectures which began in 1953. From that point on
until his death in 1981, Lacan took a different theme each academic year and delivered a
series of lectures on it. These twenty-seven annual series of lectures are usually referred
to collectively as ‘the seminar’, in the singular.
After ten years at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, the seminar moved to the École Normale
Supérieure in 1964, and to the Faculté de Droit in 1973. These changes of venue were
due to various reasons, not least of which was the need to accommodate the constantly
growing audience as the seminar gradually became a focal point in the Parisian
intellectual resurgence of the 1950s and 1960s.
Given Lacan’s insistence that speech is the only medium of psychoanalysis (E, 40), it
is perhaps appropriate that the original means by which Lacan developed and expounded
his ideas should have been the spoken word. Indeed, as one commentator has remarked;
‘It must be recalled that virtually all of Lacan’s “writings” (Écrits) were originally oral
presentations, that in many ways the open-ended Seminar was his preferred environment’
(Macey, 1995:77).
As Lacan’s seminars became increasingly popular, demand grew for written
transcripts of the seminar. However, apart from a few small articles that he wrote on the
basis of some lectures delivered in the course of the seminar, Lacan never published any
account of his own seminars. In 1956–9 Lacan authorised Jean-Bertrand Pontalis to
publish a few summaries of sections of the seminar during those years, but this was not
enough to satisfy the growing demand for written accounts of Lacan’s teaching. Hence
unauthorised transcripts of Lacan’s seminar began increasingly to be circulated among
his followers in an almost clandestine way. In 1973, Lacan allowed his son-in-law,
Jacques-Alain Miller, to publish an edited transcript of the lectures given in 1964, the
eleventh year of the seminar. Since then, Miller has continued to bring out edited versions
of other years of the seminar, although the number published is still fewer than half.
Miller’s role in editing and publishing the seminar has led to some very heated
arguments, with opponents claiming he has distorted Lacan’s original. However, as
Miller himself has pointed out, the transition from an oral to a written medium, and the
editing required by this, means that these published versions of the seminar could never
be simple transcripts of the lectures given by Lacan (see Miller, 1985). So far only nine
of the yearly seminars have been published in book form, while authorised extracts from
others have appeared in the journal Ornicar? Unauthorised transcripts of the unpublished
years of the seminar continue to circulate today, both in France and abroad.


"the unconscious is structured like a language"

"the signifier is that which represents the subject for another signifier"

"there is no metalanguage" (because language is its own metalanguage)

“man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”

"the truth arises from misrecognition" "the truth has the structure of a fiction"


Lacan is not a "post-structuralist", as he does not try to totally deconstruct the entire notion of the subject into contingent unconscious forces, although he does consider the failure of subjectivity in such phenomena as the psychoses, and the re-establishment of it after its loss.

lacan's definition of the subject as that which the signifier represents to another signifier is probably borrowed from peirce's semiotic logic

lacan's three registers of reality, imaginary, symbolic, and real, also probably derive from peirce's firstness, secondness, and thirdness

(lacan's 3 periods: Imaginary/phenomenological, Symbolic/structuralist, Real) [the fourth? Sinthome/knot theory?]


https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/medicine/psychology-and-psychiatry-biographies/jacques-lacan

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/

https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/

https://web.archive.org/web/20200127095736/https://www.processpsychology.com/new-articles/Lacan-PP-revised.htm

https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~sflores/klageslacan.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Jacques_Lacan


lacan and peirce and brouwer

possibly update lacan's use of charles k ogden's the meaning of meaning with arne naess' interpretation and preciseness

https://www.encyclopedia.com/psychology/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/aimee-case

Lacan on Madness: Madness, yes you can't - Patricia Gherovici, Manya Steinkoler (Editors)

Phenomenology and Lacan on Schizophrenia after the Decade of the Brain (Figures of the Unconscious) - Alphonse De Waelhens, Wilfried Ver Eecke

The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan - Samo Tomsic

compare samo tomsic's work to masud khan

http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/issue/view/8 Capitalism and Psychoanalysis (2015) - Edited by John Holland

http://www.lineofbeauty.org/index.php/S/article/view/65/84 Laughter and Capitalism - Samo Tomšič

Lacan and the Subject of Language (RLE: Lacan) - Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Mark Bracher

Loving Psychoanalysis: Looking at Culture with Freud and Lacan - Ruth Golan

Lacan and the Human Sciences - Alexandre Leupin

Jean-Michel Rabate - Lacan in America (Lacanian Clinical Field)

http://human-nature.com/free-associations/minsky.html

compares lacan to object relations and bollas

lacan says the psychotic lacks the possibility for symbolizing, a conclusion freud doesn't necessarily come to

fantasy is part of reality itself, both as (causal) Real and imaginary constituted reality

Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Cornell Paperbacks) - Jean-Joseph Goux

http://www.persee.fr/doc/lgge_0458-726x_1996_num_30_124_1766 Ce que Lacan retient de Damourette et Pichon : l'exemple de la négation - M. Arrive

http://www.persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_1989_num_11_2_2301 Pichon et Lacan : quelques lieux de rencontre - Michel Arrivé

http://www.persee.fr/author/persee_280356 Arrivé, Michel

"de la grammaire à l'inconscient ; dans les traces de Damourette et Pichon" - Michel Arrivé

Timeline

Rome Discourse (1953)

http://nosubject.com/The_Function_and_Field_of_Speech_and_Language_in_Psychoanalysis

in french:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QR_KtFenKTNkVHAlEpCVCe_HwdbQhRzHfRBAvkJso94/edit?hl=en

Seminar XI

Zizek's Hegelian Interpretation of Lacan

Lacan and Affect

André Green's criticism of the lack of affect in lacan's theory

http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/schneiderman.html Affects - Stuard Schneiderman

Lacanian Affects: The function of affect in Lacan's work - Colette Soler

Lacan and André Green

Lacan and Bion

Lacan and Winnicott

Lacan and the Cogito

“I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think.”

Édouard Pichon

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89douard_Pichon

"C'est à Pichon que Lacan empruntera le terme de forclusion qui définit le mécanisme psychique caractéristique de la structure psychotique."

Des mots à la pensée:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k239953 Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 1.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k23994r Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 2.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62514638 Des mots à la pensée. Essai de grammaire de la langue française. T. 3
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k239922 Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 4.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k23991q Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 5.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k23990c Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 6.
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k239895 Des mots à la pensée : essai de grammaire de la langue française. Tome 7.

Lacan and

freud, heidegger, spinoza, hegel, kant, levi-strauss, saussure

Lacan and Lévi-Strauss

"people's customs… form into systems… [which are] not unlimited and that human societies, like individual human beings (at play, in dreams, in moments of delirium), never create absolutely: all they can do is choose certain combinations from a repertory of ideas which it should be possible to reconstitute"

- Claude Lévi-Strauss

Seminars

https://www.lacan.com/seminars1a.htm

Seminars in English:

http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/published-works/seminars/

Seminars in French:

http://staferla.free.fr/

http://gaogoa.free.fr/


http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0257.html The Mystic Writing Pad

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lagache

http://www.psychomedia.it/pm/indther/lacandx1.htm

http://r-t-groome.com/?cat=1

http://www.legaufey.fr/Textes/Attention.html

https://www.lacan.com/theeffect.htm

https://www.lacan.com/symptom10a/ordinary-psychosis.html

https://reinoetude.tumblr.com/post/110257144937/why-lacan-is-not-a-heideggerian

https://nosubject.com/Articles/Slavoj_Zizek/why-lacan-is-not-lacanian.html

http://transmissiononline.org/issue/self-liberation-in-phenomenology-and-dzogchen/article/winnicott-and-lacan-and-the-lack-within-subjectivity-in-the-context-of-dzogchen Winnicott and Lacan and The Lack within Subjectivity In the Context of Dzogchen - Rudolph Bauer

Jacques-Alain Miller. 'Algorithmes de psychoanalyse', Ornicar?, 16, 1978.

http://web.archive.org/web/20030629180311/http://www.elm.qc.ca/Topologie/Annexe%2021-22-23/annexe_23.html

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/ricoeur-and-lacan/

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/lacan-anti-philosophy-3/

https://www.academia.edu/8690151/Outlines_of_Jacques_Lacan_s_Ethics_of_Subjectivity

https://www.academia.edu/37545731/METALANGUAGE_FORMAL_STRUCTURES_AND_THE_DISSOLUTION_OF_TRANSFERENCE

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41282-022-00281-5 Wittgenstein’s Unglauben: Jacques Lacan and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

https://utheses.univie.ac.at/detail/15665 Sprache, Wirklichkeit und Subjekt bei Ludwig Wittgenstein und Jacques Lacan - Flora Rumpler

https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/articles/wittgenstein-and-lacan-reading-freud-1-2/ Wittgenstein and Lacan Reading Freud - Sergio Benvenuto

https://crisiscritique.org/2018h/livingston.pdf Science, Language, and the “Truth of the Subject:” Lacan and Wittgenstein - Paul Livingston

http://theletter.ie/ The Letter: Irish Journal for Lacanian Psychoanalysis

https://sites.google.com/site/dugowsonrecherche/

http://apwonline.org/library.html

Egocracy: Marx, Freud and Lacan - Sonia Arribus

https://www.lacan.com/symptom/being-is-desire-jacques-alain-miller/

http://bulk.lutecium.org/pro.wanadoo.fr/espace.freud/topos/psycha/psysem/homoloup.htm Jacques Lacan, séminaire sur l'homme aux loups, 1952-53

https://journals.openedition.org/semen/10723 La sexuisemblance : théorie, discours et actualité - Cécile Mathieu

https://breac.nd.edu/articles/mirrors-lacan-with-joyce-theory-psychoanalysis-and-literature/ Lacan with Joyce: Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Literature - Beryl Schlossman (University of California, Irvine)

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43263844 Bachelard, Lacan and the Impurity of Scientific Formalization - Tom Eyers

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/isj2/1980/no2-007/collier.html Andrew Collier - Lacan, psychoanalysis and the left

Links

https://www.lacan.com/

https://www.freud2lacan.com/

http://nosubject.com/

http://www.topoi.net/

https://www.lacanonline.com/

http://www.lacaninireland.com/

https://lacangroup.org/

Selected Articles

Lacan and Mathematics Lacan and Logic Lacan and Science Lacan and Politics Lacan and Literature Lacan and Religion

Lacan and Language Lacan and Art Lacan and Cinema

The Imaginary The Symbolic The Real Sinthome

Mirror Stage Oedipus Complex Castration Other

Jouissance Unconscious Signifier Drive Desire Lack

The Lacanian Subject Lacanian Ethics Lacan and Epistemology

Desire is the Desire of the Other The Act

Lacan's Seminars

Lacan and Hegel Lacan and Deleuze Lacan and Derrida Lacan and Foucault

Lacan and Kant

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