with Lacan

Structure and The Epistemic Supposition of Clinical Categories:   re-reading Jacques-Alain Miller’s Ordinary Psychosis Revisited This paper comes from the midst of a cartel  (a cartel is a kind of study group established by Lacan as a principle organ of his School)  on clinical structures, with Jacques-Alain Miller’s S’truc dure in mind, and in a discussion of his Ordinary Psychosis Revisited amongst other papers. I presented this paper at a cartel day of the Irish Circle of the Lacanian Orientation. I don't mention Ordinary Psychosis Revisited because of its subject matter, psychosis, so much as that it comes to hand as a way to think about the way clinical categories respond to a Lacanian orientation. A question from Ordinary Psychosis Revisited. Miller proposes that with ordinary psychosis: “It’s more of an epistemic category than an objective category. It concerns our way of knowing it.” My question from the start about this corresponds to the structuralist pa...

This is an answer offered recently on social media (a corner for discussion of psychoanalysis in general) to this question: My purpose in life is to be as authentic as possible. I want to experience every fiber of myself truthfully. Is analysis aligned with that goal or are there any other approaches that are more helpful? This question is really quite interesting. Thanks for it. What do we mean when we say 'authentic'? We have auto , self, and hentes, doing or being – it could be being oneself, in which case we might question what the self is. In my orientation we speak of a subject , which is not divisible from the language in which it is caught, and thus not as contained as one might imagine. If authority is a correspondant of autonomy, well, at the level of the subject, perhaps analysis is not aimed there. And at the same time the subject has a kind of emptiness, or being barred, and realising for oneself something of the emptiness of the subject is something that might be ...

 This is a paper I presented at the Summer University at Performance Arts Forum in St Erme, France, in late August of 2024, presenting alongside a small group of colleagues for a mixed audience, working towards the theme "Why Psychanalysis?" Is Psychoanalysis Weird? American party politics has recently put the signifier ‘weird’ front and centre in a way which is no doubt resonant, and is seemingly effective. It’s used there as a way of designating the strangeness of an out-group, and one can be reminded of Lacan’s idea of group identification [from his text on Logical Time, but this version from Éric Laurent's Racism 2.0 ]:   A man knows what is not a man;   Men recognise themselves among themselves;   I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.   That is to say, we don’t know so well what ‘we’ are as a group except by relation to what we take to be improper to our group, to what is alien, or foreign to it. We claim to be...

This is a short text intended as part of an introduction for a small publication project which it was not possible to undertake. Nonetheless I think the text stands without that context, and so here it is.  Out-of-Series / Hors-série What is this? This Out-of-Series, this Hors-série? On first parse it’s a place for writing towards the work of the School that fall out of the themes and formats that make a common flow of the School. Why that? The hors of hors-série is a word that comes up occasionally with Jacques Lacan, and Jacques-Alain Miller. For example there’s the hors-sen s, the out-of-meaning or out-of-sense. It’s a terms which I can find only once with Lacan in fact, in the Compte rendu du séminaire of …ou pire , in Autres êcrits (p547). Lacan talks of the hors-sens , the out-of-meaning, which is what interested him in the transmission of mathematical knowledge, and which he sought to bring to the transmission of psychoanalysis. Lacan referred there to hors-sens not with...