Papers
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From Love Triangle to the Tetrahedron of Love
Lacan announces in his seminar of 1962-63 that anxiety is “the only affect that does not deceive“. This short writing considers how the subject ($) appears in the aftermath of anxiety affect, according to the schema of division of the Other by the question of the subject. Lacan, following Freud’s reconceptualisation of anxiety, from asserting…
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Excusez-moi! Pardon my French…
“Sit venia verbo” is a Latin phrase employed by Freud in the ‘Wolf Man’ case, and highlighted by Lacan in his Rome discourse presentation. If you’ll permit me, I’ll read the passage from The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis: Freud plainly stressed this when, unable to avoid a conjunction of opposing…
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Future Anterior of Psychoanalysis
Early in the course of his 1957-1958 seminar, ‘The Formations of the Unconscious’, Jacques Lacan determines that “a discourse is something which leads somewhere, has a fabric, a texture”(Lacan, 1958, p6). Discourse is what we have to work with, the stuff of psychoanalytic work, and “once you’ve got caught in the wheel of this word-mill,…
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Psychoanalysis Upside Down; Book XVII
Georges Politzer, born 3rd May 1903, executed by firing squad 23rd May 1942, published his Critique of the Foundations of Psychology in 1928. It was subsequently re-edited in 1969, as Lacan remarks in his 1969/70 Seminar on The Reverse Side of Psychoanalysis, “without, to my knowledge, anything being able to show that the author would…
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Not all who wander are lost
I presented this short paper at the June 2021 ISLP Inter-Cartel Study Day. I was in a Cartel with three others, plus one, reading Lacan’s 21st seminar Les-Non-Dupes-Errent, in association with his 19th seminar, …Ou pire. The thrust of my incomplete argument is that knowing is a fool’s errand. The experience of mistaking, mis-takes in…
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The Sound of Silence
Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom Jakobson collaborated between 1942 and 1946 at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, and where Jakobson fled to from the World-War invasion of then Czechoslovakia, first to Scandinavia and then America, writes the preface to Jakobson’s six lectures on sound and meaning. His contribution corrects one aspect of…